Newcomer to servers

K0MP4CT · May 7, 2019

Greetings! I hope you're all well.

I'm looking at building a small server to run a game server for friends and myself. Money is not an issue, but I don't want to spend more than necessary. I'm aware I can rent servers online, but I've tried many sites and I'm fed up of them.

Regardless, the server will only be hosting 8 people maximum and the games range from Arma to Minecraft (it's not a kids game...it is but I don't care). I've been hosting servers on my PC just fine but that of course has the issue of being turned off whenever I'm not at my PC.

Simply put, I'm looking for a build I can piece together, with some guides or information on how to get started with servers. It's a project for leisure use, but I also want to learn more about them. Any help is appreciated. Thank you.

Oshino Shinobu · May 7, 2019

There's nothing really special about servers. It's more about what they do rather than what's inside them.

You can absolutely just build a PC with normal consumer parts, install whatever applications you need and spin up your game servers and bam, you've got a server.

If you're more interested in the "server" hardware, which includes things like completely headless systems, ECC RAM, overall redundancy and such, then ideally we'd need a budget and an idea of what load your current PC sees when hosting games, as well as the hardware you have so we can tell how hard it's actually getting hit.

Bear in mind that server hardware is normally intended for environments where downtime is not acceptable. They often cost a fair bit more because of this.

I would suggest just building using normal components and install whatever hosting applications you need and be done with it. You don't really need dedicated server hardware for your use case so you can save some money. Just set the system to auto-power on when it gets power and set whatever applications you need running to launch on startup so that in the event the server does go down, it will come back on by itself.

K0MP4CT · May 7, 2019

3 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

There's nothing really special about servers. It's more about what they do rather than what's inside them.

You can absolutely just build a PC with normal consumer parts, install whatever applications you need and spin up your game servers and bam, you've got a server.

If you're more interested in the "server" hardware, which includes things like completely headless systems, ECC RAM, overall redundancy and such, then ideally we'd need a budget and an idea of what load your current PC sees when hosting games, as well as the hardware you have so we can tell how hard it's actually getting hit.

Bear in mind that server hardware is normally intended for environments where downtime is not acceptable. They often cost a fair bit more because of this.

I would suggest just building using normal components and install whatever hosting applications you need and be done with it. You don't really need dedicated server hardware for your use case so you can save some money. Just set the system to auto-power on when it gets power and set whatever applications you need running to launch on startup so that in the event the server does go down, it will come back on by itself.

Thank you for the detailed reply. I doubt I need expensive server hardware because as you said, downtime is acceptable, it's just not ideal. I'm not sure on a budget because I really don't know what I need. Can you give me an estimated startup budget?

My current PC:

i7-4790K

GTX 1070

16GB DDR3 RAM

2TB HDD

1TB SSD

650W PSU

Oshino Shinobu · May 7, 2019

29 minutes ago, K0MP4CT said:

Thank you for the detailed reply. I doubt I need expensive server hardware because as you said, downtime is acceptable, it's just not ideal. I'm not sure on a budget because I really don't know what I need. Can you give me an estimated startup budget?

My current PC:

i7-4790K

GTX 1070

16GB DDR3 RAM

2TB HDD

1TB SSD

650W PSU

How does your current PC handle hosting games?

If it handles it okay, you could consider upgrading your current PC and re-purposing some of the equipment from it.

The main concerns are going to be CPU and RAM for the vast majority of server uses. I don't even have a display output in my server because it's managed entirely remotely has doesn't have a need for a GPU.

Considering how you don't need to spend the money on a GPU, I'd suggest setting yourself about a £600 budget and see what you can get for that.

If you stick with DDR3, you can get 32GB for around £100-£140. I recently moved to 32GB on my own server. You could start with 2x8GB and wait to see how RAM usage is before moving to 32GB.