Small Office Server

[StatusUnknown]

Budget (including currency): Less than £600 Sterling. 

Country: England

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: General Office and Admin work. Nothing too heavy. 

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): 

 

Hey Guys, 

I have a small addiction to Anthony's videos so imagine my excitement when my boss decided my Dropbox subscription and externally hosted emails had to go. Its costing £600 per year. I have volunteered to build a company Server which I plan to make from a recycled desktop PC bought from eBay. 

 

We will have 2-6 users storing mostly text, scanned documents, PDF's and the like. No video or huge files. Defo no gaming. It will also be our email server. 

 

What do you think I'll need for specs? I was thinking either a Core i5-i7 with 32gb of Ram and two 4tb Iron Wolf's with one redundant. Is 32gb overkill and 16gb suffice? I'll be using TruNAS for file management. 

 

I will need remote access which seems to require a VPN. I'd much prefer a background encryption as some of the people (my boss) stopped moving with technology in 2003. Also how will this plan work with mobile email apps? Will we have to log in to download emails or can it happen automatically like when you use gmail? 

 

All help is greatfully received. 

 

Ash. 

 

[whispous]

You will not be able to run your business on a locally hosted email server. Your locally hosted email server will fail to get it's mail to most people in the world.

 

Do not try and self host business email on a box in an office! You will spend many hours every week just toiling away at trying to get it whitelisted by every major email service. And it will still fail.

[adm0n]

Everything but the email part, is doable. If you want to really get into it, you could even open your to the internet. But that requires a heck of a lot of work to get right. So I would only recommend you to do it via a VPN. IF you want to go down the rabbit hole yourself, feel free.

 

If you want a mail server, I think you can rent those, but you can't really get them for free.

[StatusUnknown]

So whats the deal with email? If I use the domain provider (go daddy) its £4.99 per month per email address. That mounts up quick. I need to be able to quickly and cheaply add @mydomain.com email addresses. Is there a solution?

[manikyath]

dont run E-mail onsite.. it's a lot of work to maintain, it's limiting your options for connectivity, and if the power or net at the office goes down mails actually just bounce back to the sender stating that your E-mail server doesnt exist.

 

also.. you likely are already using MS office.. it's a business, time is LITERALLY money.

2 minutes ago, StatusUnknown said:

So whats the deal with email? If I use the domain provider (go daddy) its £4.99 per month per email address. That mounts up quick. I need to be able to quickly and cheaply add @mydomain.com email addresses. Is there a solution?

exchange online. if you dont need anything but E-mail, it's €4 per EXO plan1 license.

 

yes.. microsoft is a horrid monopoly in the business world, but it just freaking works, so use what works.

[Yannic5]

Just get a proper cloud solution ffs - You should not use an old desktop for production critical operations in a business. If it fails you boss will loose tons of money compared to a proper solution. Keep in mind everyone that works there is also paid hourly - So each hour they cant work is wasted time & money

[Needfuldoer]

Do not stake business operations on cheap, cobbled-together junk.

 

For one thing, your boss isn't going to turn that £600 bill into a £0 bill, because the machine's going to cost electricity to run. There goes about half the "savings" right there. (And frankly if they're pinching pennies to the point where they're willing to take this kind of risk over £600, I'd make sure my resume is up to date.)

 

There are major security risks involved in self-hosting email. If your Internet connection isn't up to snuff, it's going to be slow. If you expose the email server to the outside world and you don't know what you're doing, you'll get blacklisted by all the major email providers when it gets exploited as a spam relay. You're also losing your automatic off-site backups and easy way to share files with clients.

 

And if when hardware breaks or your Internet connection goes down and the machine's inaccessible, the company's going to grind to a halt and the business will lose ££££££££ in lost productivity, because nobody has their shared files or email.

 

Do you know whose fault will that be, in management's eyes?

 

YOURS.

 

Because it was your idea and your pet project. 

 

And who will management "hold accountable" (read: terminate) if when disaster strikes?

 

YOU.

 

 

DO NOT DO THIS.

 

IF you were to do your hosting in-house, I wouldn't do it on anything less than a real server with redundant drives and power supplies, a UPS, someone on-staff who knows what they're doing to operate it, and a support contract with turnaround times measured in hours. Any one of those things will cost a lot more than £600.

 

That £600 per year gets you professional, reasonably secure cloud hosting (so your files are accessible everywhere), with guaranteed uptime (five nines at least). That's simply cost of doing business, just like the electric and sewer bills. It's chump change compared to the potential cost of not having email. And if your boss can't understand that, and only sees "subscription computery thing costs money, computer we already own is free", and you're the office techie, do them a favor and save them from themselves.

 

Just use Office 365 instead. Teams and OneDrive are a huge value add over relatively expensive ISP email. (Nobody uses ISP email anymore, it's not 1995.)