Server for starting up a business

[Networking Wolf]

Hey I'm wanting to start up a company for server hosting and data back up. I have a few friends who are interested in the company and would like to use the servers for minecraft or for backing up files. Is there a good server which I should lok into. Im looking for one thats cheap and has no os, Ill probably get free windows server 2016 and throw it on.

[Orangeator]

Well you generally do not "buy" a server pre-built. Basically a server is a computer in a way that has a shit ton of storage and runs off of xeon processors (also ecc ram). Generally what you do is buy lets say 25TB's of hard drives, you (well I would recommend) buying another 25TB's of hard drives and set it up to the second data is put on the "front line" it immediately backs it up to the second set of hard drives. That way if the one of the hard drives fail, you have a backup. If you would like me to do a pcpartpicker for you, tell me how much storage you need and what you budget is?

 

Also if your budget is large enough I would highly recommend using SSD's instead of standard HDD's.

[Networking Wolf]

my budget is no more than 200 usd per unit and storage amount about 50tb to start with

 

[Networking Wolf]

I am thinking about picking one of these ups http://www.amazon.com/PowerEdge-Server-2x2-66GHz-E5430-6x1TB/dp/B00H3MT17Q/ref=sr_1_31?ie=UTF8&qid=1457515156&sr=8-31&keywords=server

 

[bob345]

Not trying to sound pessimistic, but you would be getting into a very crowded market with a company like that. 

[Networking Wolf]

37 minutes ago, bob345 said:

Not trying to sound pessimistic, but you would be getting into a very crowded market with a company like that. 

I know but if I target like mom and pa shops where they dont have much it would helpful

[Sir Asvald]

5 hours ago, Jstone said:

Hey I'm wanting to start up a company for server hosting and data back up. I have a few friends who are interested in the company and would like to use the servers for minecraft or for backing up files. Is there a good server which I should lok into. Im looking for one thats cheap and has no os, Ill probably get free windows server 2016 and throw it on.

Couple of questions. Where are you planning to host the servers and how? How much people WILL you use your service? The price for internet connection. You're going to see a lot of traffic. How much are you going to spend? 

[conspiravision]

6 hours ago, Jstone said:

my budget is no more than 200 usd per unit and storage amount about 50tb to start with

 

Is this going to be like a physical server at the customer site or are you going to use like VDI or something for the customers?  Not to mention that 50TB is recommended to be on a RAID configuration not a JBOD configuration.

[1823alex]

The 2950 is an old an power hungry beast. You should be looking on eBay and craigslist for servers by the way, most of the ones on Amazon are probably marked up a shit ton.

[F4S4K4N]

10th Generation PowerEdge servers used to be the best budget server to pick up, but the 11th generation is now starting to come down enough to where it makes more sense to go that direction. They have DDR3, 6Gbps SAS, and better virtualization features to name a few.

 

You also need to consider, cooling, electricity, and internet costs as well as the cost of the networking equipment you'll need. I still run a ton of PowerEdge 1950's and they average around 700 Watts per server. They also put out about 2000 BTU's of heat per server. You're standard broadband connection is not going to cut it, you're going to need dedicated service. Around my area, dedicated internet starts around $700 per month.

[Jarsky]

While I don't want to be a downer, you need to be realistic about what you're getting into providing server hosting.

I've worked with professional hosting and theres a lot that goes into it - and to be honest, if you arent even sure about what servers you should be getting, its unlikely you know about what else needs to be considered.

 

- Network and Switching elements and VLAN configuration for providing internet routing, and isolating servers from eachother

- IP Address allocation and management - Nameserver/DNS management including PTR records etc...

- Bandwidth purchasing and CIR (guaranteed bandwidth) need to be negotiated

- Firewall security and bandwidth/data logging

- Power, Bandwidth & Cooling (power & bandwidth are still consideration even when hosting in a DC)

- Your SLA contracts to your customers, and with your providers

- Maintenance of servers, who will physically go on site in a hardware failure or where iLO/KVM management doesnt work

- Backup of your customers server data in the event of failure

- What sort of Engineer support are you providing in the event a customer stuffs up their server?

- If your providing Engineer support, then have you thought about customisation needed to your OS installs with even just basics such as an engineer admin account to gain access?

 

As for Windows Server 2016, it is still in a Technical Preview state, it has not reached RC. Additionally putting any free version on a commercial server completely violates Microsofts TOS. You cannot legally use "free copies" in a service you're providing to customers.

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Jarsky said:

While I don't want to be a downer, you need to be realistic about what you're getting into providing server hosting.

I've worked with professional hosting and theres a lot that goes into it - and to be honest, if you arent even sure about what servers you should be getting, its unlikely you know about what else needs to be considered.

 

- Network and Switching elements and VLAN configuration for providing internet routing, and isolating servers from eachother

- IP Address allocation and management - Nameserver/DNS management including PTR records etc...

- Bandwidth purchasing and CIR (guaranteed bandwidth) need to be negotiated

- Firewall security and bandwidth/data logging

- Power, Bandwidth & Cooling (power & bandwidth are still consideration even when hosting in a DC)

- Your SLA contracts to your customers, and with your providers

- Maintenance of servers, who will physically go on site in a hardware failure or where iLO/KVM management doesnt work

- Backup of your customers server data in the event of failure

- What sort of Engineer support are you providing in the event a customer stuffs up their server?

- If your providing Engineer support, then have you thought about customisation needed to your OS installs with even just basics such as an engineer admin account to gain access?

 

As for Windows Server 2016, it is still in a Technical Preview state, it has not reached RC. Additionally putting any free version on a commercial server completely violates Microsofts TOS. You cannot legally use "free copies" in a service you're providing to customers.

+1

 

You'll also need to have completed certain compliance things for insurance & local laws.

13 hours ago, Orangeator said:

Well you generally do not "buy" a server pre-built. Basically a server is a computer in a way that has a shit ton of storage and runs off of xeon processors (also ecc ram). Generally what you do is buy lets say 25TB's of hard drives, you (well I would recommend) buying another 25TB's of hard drives and set it up to the second data is put on the "front line" it immediately backs it up to the second set of hard drives. That way if the one of the hard drives fail, you have a backup. If you would like me to do a pcpartpicker for you, tell me how much storage you need and what you budget is?

 

Also if your budget is large enough I would highly recommend using SSD's instead of standard HDD's.

What do you mean you don't generally buy pre built? 80%+ of the market is HP, Dell, Lenovo or IBM servers? If you use 'custom' servers and your name isn't Google, you're looked on as a bit of an idiot.

[Orangeator]

9 hours ago, Windspeed36 said:

+1

 

You'll also need to have completed certain compliance things for insurance & local laws.

What do you mean you don't generally buy pre built? 80%+ of the market is HP, Dell, Lenovo or IBM servers? If you use 'custom' servers and your name isn't Google, you're looked on as a bit of an idiot.

Buying a prebuilt server is very over priced. You can buy the nutshell of one which is what you are supposed to do, what I was meaning is don't buy a prebuilt and pay for their storage devices. They up charge worse then apple. 

[Danielh90]

I would buy a cheap server see how that goes and upgrade it to your needs. or just go out and pay monthly for dedicated box. 

[jlittle98]

iam

interested

 

 

 working with  your company 

[Networking Wolf]

19 hours ago, Danielh90 said:

I would buy a cheap server see how that goes and upgrade it to your needs. or just go out and pay monthly for dedicated box. 

do you have any suggestions. I am a dell tech so I wanna get dells so I can work on them myself and not void any warrenties.

 

On 3/10/2016 at 7:26 PM, F4S4K4N said:

10th Generation PowerEdge servers used to be the best budget server to pick up, but the 11th generation is now starting to come down enough to where it makes more sense to go that direction. They have DDR3, 6Gbps SAS, and better virtualization features to name a few.

 

You also need to consider, cooling, electricity, and internet costs as well as the cost of the networking equipment you'll need. I still run a ton of PowerEdge 1950's and they average around 700 Watts per server. They also put out about 2000 BTU's of heat per server. You're standard broadband connection is not going to cut it, you're going to need dedicated service. Around my area, dedicated internet starts around $700 per month.

Can you put a link in here for a server in that generation please.

 

18 hours ago, jlittle98 said:

iam

interested

 

 

 working with  your company 

Its nice to see you interested it has always been my dream to bring external back up at a cheaper rate to the masses to help prevent data loss and or corruption. I plan on launching this adventure when I have more money set up for it. All servers will be fed in a watch guard fire wall. It is currently the best firewall for servers and it is easy to find a vendor in my area who is willing to sell me one with a 3 year warranty. The next best is sonic wall but they are hard to work on and currently the are being fased out.

[Danielh90]

13 minutes ago, Jstone said:

do you have any suggestions. I am a dell tech so I wanna get dells so I can work on them myself and not void any warrenties.

 

Can you put a link in here for a server in that generation please.

 

Its nice to see you interested it has always been my dream to bring external back up at a cheaper rate to the masses to help prevent data loss and or corruption. I plan on launching this adventure when I have more money set up for it. All servers will be fed in a watch guard fire wall. It is currently the best firewall for servers and it is easy to find a vendor in my area who is willing to sell me one with a 3 year warranty. The next best is sonic wall but they are hard to work on and currently the are being fased out.

Not witch one dell server I  would go for a cheap one and go from there. My worries that if you put alot of money in to this company and it fails you just wasted ALOT of your money. so I would put 100 or 300 dollars in to buying a server. 

[Networking Wolf]

Just now, Danielh90 said:

Not witch one dell server I  would go for a cheap one and go from there. My worries that if you put alot of money in to this company and it fails you just wasted ALOT of your money. so I would put 100 or 300 dollars in to buying a server. 

so would it be a good idea to start with the servers I linked in this forum? I can pick up about 3 of them and get a lot of hard drives. I could get the watchguard for about 2000 usd

[Danielh90]

2 minutes ago, Jstone said:

so would it be a good idea to start with the servers I linked in this forum? I can pick up about 3 of them and get a lot of hard drives. I could get the watchguard for about 2000 usd

Yeah I just bought a dell poweredge 2950 III from them it should come in today but Yeah. I have not looked in to watchguard yet. 

[Networking Wolf]

Just now, Danielh90 said:

Yeah I just bought a dell poweredge 2950 III from them it should come in today but Yeah. I have not looked in to watchguard yet. 

I work with watch guard through my daily job and I love them. Connect them with a netgear switch and you have one of the best systems ever. Cisco is nice but they are hard as hell to configure and they very rarely come out of the factor with all the ports configured and properly set up.

[deepend]

On 10/03/2016 at 5:42 AM, Jstone said:

I work with watch guard through my daily job and I love them. Connect them with a netgear switch and you have one of the best systems ever. Cisco is nice but they are hard as hell to configure and they very rarely come out of the factor with all the ports configured and properly set up.

For a start up your probably better off leasing a server or two from some where like OVH.   Would be a great way to start out.  I currently have three dedicated servers and a VPS through them and they work great.  I have previously attempted the same as you and the market was just too saturated for a low budget start up. (especially without a ground breaking idea)  

 

[Networking Wolf]

5 hours ago, mbuchholz said:

For a start up your probably better off leasing a server or two from some where like OVH.   Would be a great way to start out.  I currently have three dedicated servers and a VPS through them and they work great.  I have previously attempted the same as you and the market was just too saturated for a low budget start up. (especially without a ground breaking idea)  

 

I looked more into it and I've decided it wouldn't be the best for me to do. I am probably just going  to continue trying to create video games and go that route.

[KuJoe]

On 3/8/2016 at 0:10 PM, Jstone said:

I am thinking about picking one of these ups http://www.amazon.com/PowerEdge-Server-2x2-66GHz-E5430-6x1TB/dp/B00H3MT17Q/ref=sr_1_31?ie=UTF8&qid=1457515156&sr=8-31&keywords=server

 

I would avoid 2950s. They were great back in the day (heck, I still have a few in production) but for the cost they aren't worth it. Depending on the data center you'll be hosting this in the cost of power isn't worth it. Go grab a Dell R610 or R710, they use 1/3 of the power (1 amp vs 3 amps @ 110v) and they have significantly better hardware. The PERC6i cards in the 2950s are nothing compare to the H700s and the DRAC5 is horribly flaky to work with compared to the iDRAC6 (and make sure to spend the extra couple bucks for the iDRAC6 Enterprise). If you can't afford to drop ~$1k for a server then renting one from a data center is your best bet (and pretty cheap if you know where to look).

 

Another thing to keep in mind is the cost of IPs. With ARIN running out of IPs, prices will be going up. I really wish I was one of those companies hoarding IPs when they were giving them our like candy, oh well.