Building one or two servers in my office

[TomislaV]

Hello guys ! 

 

Lately i got acces to a nice small office. We got much free space there and we can have a good internet connection. I tought about setting up one or two servers around there but i dont need such a good machines only for myself. Do you think it's a good idea to rent them for somebody ? Im not really into server stuff ( i mean setting them up ) im more of a hardware freak. You think thats a good idea ? How can i deal with my lack of server administration abilities ? You got some good tutorials or forums dedicated for such stuff ? Or maybe i can just go to sb sayin: "Yo i got a free machine do what ever you whant on it but pay me "this much" per month"?

 

Im waitin for your replies.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id suggest you buy them premade or use a offsite server.

 

Depending of what you want to do AD, File server, Mail, Messaging, Backup, Id probably get something like a dell t330 running esxi or xen.

 

I can help configure it if you want

[TomislaV]

Nice ! Hope to catch you up sometime dude, and what kind of inthernet do i need for 2 serwers ? 80 ? 150 ? 200 ? (both ways) 

 

( i know more is better but i dont want to pay for a huge overkill )

[MrAlfredBuddyGuy]

You'll need to spell out what your actual needs are for the best feedback. Are you talking email and file server only? Or do you have a phone system, nas, web site, databases etc.

 

For small office you can buy really beastly servers on ebay for under $500. as long as you don't mind being a couple gens behind. I'm talking 8-20+ cores and oodls of ram. Virtualize the crap out of everything and have a field day.

 

I would guess that for your needs (1 or 2 servers), any used server you can find  within the $300-$500 range will be over kill but will pretty much give you the flexibility to do whatever you can dream of. But on the other hand. a new server from dell/hp etc gonna cost you nearly $1000 after tax and shipping for a single xeon e3-1200 series and maybe 4gb memory. Those specs are good mostly as a stand alone server or two very lightweight vms... again depending on what you want to setup.

 

Lastly, if you don't have the skills to configure the servers then that's quite the undertaking. And maybe you will need to talk to a big retailer... or I can recommend a 3rd party for the admin/configuration side if you DM me.

[Electronics Wizardy]

24 minutes ago, TomislaV said:

Nice ! Hope to catch you up sometime dude, and what kind of inthernet do i need for 2 serwers ? 80 ? 150 ? 200 ? (both ways) 

 

( i know more is better but i dont want to pay for a huge overkill )

If these are lan server, you don't need very fast internet at all. The internet will only be used for updates. All the files are stored loclly.

[TomislaV]

My needs are: 2-5 sites, up to 10 e mails, and maybe a backup service, but I can spend much more money on those servers just to rent it for sb and get some money off of it. 

 

Also I think that building a custom server in a normal not rack case, on the newest technology is the best option, correct me if I'm wrong. 

[MrAlfredBuddyGuy]

Is office 365 out of the question? For what you need. Sounds like it would be a perfect fit for your email and cloud backup. General web hosting is cheap. Unless you need more oompf for a shopping cart like magento.

 

For what you are describing, you could build a modest pc with regular consumer parts to virtualize a few servers and handle this. But  if you don't know how to configure the servers, maybe not worth the cost  of equipment  to do this in house. For accounting purposes you are choosing between an asset that will depreciate vs a standard expense.

 

You'll need 3 basic servers unless

Some apache/nginx for websites

Zimbra for email

owncloud for backup

 

[TomislaV]

I get your point guys, thank you for your replies, but im still thinking about building there servers for rent, now my sites and e mails are located elsewere, the point in my tought is i want to build servers for rent and maybe time will come to move those sites over to those servers, they are basic sites, no shopping, just an information site. And is that a good idea and can you give me some tips ?

[MrAlfredBuddyGuy]

You can pay 10 bucks a month from any value shared host that will let you host dozens of static info sites.

 

I think it's a hard value proposition for you to rent servers because of how cheap collocation can be, as low as 50 bucks a month for gigabit link and 10TB transfer, in addition to cheap virtual private servers. More importantly, you probably don't have a network uptime SLA.

 

You'll need the network infrastructure in place to segregate their servers from your lan and prevent these servers from saturating the network and preventing you from doing your own work. Then you have liability concerns if they turn out to be crazy people running some child porn network.

 

[tt2468]

Hosting servers from a non-datacenter environment is always a bad idea. Reliability can't be garunteed, and messing with hardware is more for enthusiasts than anything. 

[TomislaV]

I gry it all now guys, thank you all for your replies you helped a lot in my understanding of a server. If I'm gonna need help in any of my movements in this topic I'll be back here, cheers guys ;))