I don't know how to make a server

[Taalii]

It was suggested to me that I ask on these forums for advice.

 

I currently rent gameservers.  Most of them are aroudn 15 a month and I change between them, sometimes it's ARK others it might be terraria or any number of various sandbox type games.  I also end up spending on average 20-25 a month on a minecraft server that I run heavily modded.  As the modlists grow, so does the usage of the hardware until I have now hit the point that I would have to spend more a month to get the power the game needs.  One of the modpacks I'd like to run, Revolution3, would cost me over $50 a month to get running on my host.  It's getting to the point that I am wondering if I would be better off just running my own server, because I cannot afford to drop that kind of money every month on hosting.

 

If I want 16gigs of memory minimum, and a decent quadcore, what kind of pricing am I looking at? I'd like to be able to run at the same time a heavily modded minecraft server and some variety of other game server, let's assume ARK for the sake of having something demanding for test.

 

EDIT:Wow you guys responded fast.  Thank you.  Time to sort through the replies.

 

Edit:I was told I need to declare a budget.  Absolute top end would have to be 600, but the farther under that the better.

[yathis]

Have you tried looking at Youtube?

What is your price range?

[GDRRiley]

grab something like an old dell r710 get dual quad core 32gb of ram and 3 ssds in raid 5 for the game servers and then run any hard drives it came with in another raid 5 with auto backup so you don't lose saves. you will need a fast download and upload speed

[yathis]

2 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

grab something like an old dell r710 get dual quad core 32gb of ram and 3 ssds in raid 5 for the game servers and then run any hard drives it came with in another raid 5 with auto backup so you don't lose saves 

Are we allowed to link to a list of ebay sellers?

[Navbryce]

Buy a server off of Ebay. You can get like 8 physical cores, 16 threads, and about 12 GB's of RAM for $100; you'll need to buy HDD's/SSD's. 

 

Such as but find one that ships obviously :

http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-x3650-M2-2U-Server-2x-E5520-2-26ghz-Quad-Core-16gb-RAM-2x-Empty-HDD-Tray-/401356563492?hash=item5d72b72424:g:XwIAAOSw-zxWnoP~

 

 

[GDRRiley]

1 minute ago, yathis said:

Are we allowed to link to a list of ebay sellers?

yes a search but not a single one. public surplus is another option 

[SCHISCHKA]

 

58 minutes ago, Taalii said:

If I want 16gigs of memory minimum, and a decent quadcore, what kind of pricing am I looking at?

you can get this really cheap second hand.

i would buy a pallet of ex-lease workstations from auction and I would run HA virtual servers, but you are not me.

you need to declare a budget. you said you were looking at $50 a month so would it be reasonable to project that over 12 months to estimate a budget around $600?

 

[Jarsky]

If you want to run Minecraft 24/7 along side the other servers, I'd recommend more than quadcore/16gb.

@GDRRiley suggestion of a used Dell R710 would be my recommendation as well. You can get one with dual E5530/5540's (8C/16T) and 24-32GB for a reasonable price. if you have about $250 you could also move up to dual X5650/X5670's (12C/24T). I'd also recommend with running multi servers, and especially a heavily minecraft one, that you use SSD's as well for at least the primary servers, and at least 1 hdd for backups.

 

Ideally what i'd recommend is an R710 with at least E5530's, 24GB ram, and 2 hdd's to turn into raid0 and use for backups, install files, etc...and get a 250-500GB SSD for installing your OS/VM's and game server files too. With having a rackmount like this, it also means you could colocate it into a Datacentre if wanted.

[Taalii]

1 hour ago, Navbryce said:

Buy a server off of Ebay. You can get like 8 physical cores, 16 threads, and about 12 GB's of RAM for $100; you'll need to buy HDD's/SSD's. 

 

Such as but find one that ships obviously :

http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-x3650-M2-2U-Server-2x-E5520-2-26ghz-Quad-Core-16gb-RAM-2x-Empty-HDD-Tray-/401356563492?hash=item5d72b72424:g:XwIAAOSw-zxWnoP~

 

 

Is there anything complicated to running one of those rack machines?  I've only ever messed with desktops and laptops, so I haven't a clue how to work with those.

 

1 hour ago, SCHISCHKA said:

 

you can get this really cheap second hand.

i would buy a pallet of ex-lease workstations from auction and I would run HA virtual servers, but you are not me.

you need to declare a budget. you said you were looking at $50 a month so would it be reasonable to project that over 12 months to estimate a budget around $600?

 

I could talk myself into 500-600, obviously lower is better.  I keep being drawn to those rack servers, and seeing low prices, much like what the poster quoted above linked, but I've never messed with one and don't know how hard they are to use.  With storage like that, mind, I'd start keeping other stuff on there too, large numbers of PDFs and old music taking up space on my hard drive.  Maybe an SSD for gameservers, and a normal drive for just storage?

 

 

1 hour ago, GDRRiley said:

yes a search but not a single one. public surplus is another option 

As in govt surplus sales? I've looked at those for power tools, but never thought about using old server hardware. 

 

57 minutes ago, Jarsky said:

If you want to run Minecraft 24/7 along side the other servers, I'd recommend more than quadcore/16gb.

@GDRRiley suggestion of a used Dell R710 would be my recommendation as well. You can get one with dual E5530/5540's (8C/16T) and 24-32GB for a reasonable price. if you have about $250 you could also move up to dual X5650/X5670's (12C/24T). I'd also recommend with running multi servers, and especially a heavily minecraft one, that you use SSD's as well for at least the primary servers, and at least 1 hdd for backups.

 

Ideally what i'd recommend is an R710 with at least E5530's, 24GB ram, and 2 hdd's to turn into raid0 and use for backups, install files, etc...and get a 250-500GB SSD for installing your OS/VM's and game server files too. With having a rackmount like this, it also means you could colocate it into a Datacentre if wanted.

What are you considering 'reasonable price'?  The purpose is to save money, and I can't drop a thousand on this little project much as I'd love to...

[GDRRiley]

4 minutes ago, Taalii said:

Is there anything complicated to running one of those rack machines?  I've only ever messed with desktops and laptops, so I haven't a clue how to work with those.

 

I could talk myself into 500-600, obviously lower is better.  I keep being drawn to those rack servers, and seeing low prices, much like what the poster quoted above linked, but I've never messed with one and don't know how hard they are to use.  With storage like that, mind, I'd start keeping other stuff on there too, large numbers of PDFs and old music taking up space on my hard drive.  Maybe an SSD for gameservers, and a normal drive for just storage?

 

 

As in govt surplus sales? I've looked at those for power tools, but never thought about using old server hardware. 

 

What are you considering 'reasonable price'?  The purpose is to save money, and I can't drop a thousand on this little project much as I'd love to...

so the base can be about 200, 2x250gb SSDs 160$ hard drives it may come with. they are easy to use

[SCHISCHKA]

1 minute ago, Taalii said:

I could talk myself into 500-600, obviously lower is better.  I keep being drawn to those rack servers, and seeing low prices, much like what the poster quoted above linked, but I've never messed with one and don't know how hard they are to use.  With storage like that, mind, I'd start keeping other stuff on there too, large numbers of PDFs and old music taking up space on my hard drive.  Maybe an SSD for gameservers, and a normal drive for just storage?

something you should know is business servers can be run until they are no longer reliable. I had one die after a year of purchase so you need to consider the age of the hardware. What ever server hardware you look it compare it to a quad core ryzen 5 build, you might not be better off.

Server hardware are not hard to use.

Second hand drives are a bad idea.

 

[Taalii]

2 minutes ago, SCHISCHKA said:

something you should know is business servers can be run until they are no longer reliable. I had one die after a year of purchase so you need to consider the age of the hardware. What ever server hardware you look it compare it to a quad core ryzen 5 build, you might not be better off.

Server hardware are not hard to use.

Second hand drives are a bad idea.

 

Hard drives...I always buy new.  No matter what.  Other hardware, I'm willing to flex on, but I tend to prefer new. 

 

4 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

so the base can be about 200, 2x250gb SSDs 160$ hard drives it may come with. they are easy to use

Is that used or new?  Looking around myself as I ask this.

[GDRRiley]

Just now, Taalii said:

Hard drives...I always buy new.  No matter what.  Other hardware, I'm willing to flex on, but I tend to prefer new. 

 

Is that used or new?  Looking around myself as I ask this.

server used ssds new. 

[SCHISCHKA]

9 minutes ago, Taalii said:

Hard drives...I always buy new.  No matter what.  Other hardware, I'm willing to flex on, but I tend to prefer new. 

mine died from PSU failure. It did have a redundant PSU but the failure took out everything.

I should also point out that servers can be very loud. Mine had 6000rpm fans and sounded like an airplane taking off

[Jarsky]

2 hours ago, Taalii said:

What are you considering 'reasonable price'?  The purpose is to save money, and I can't drop a thousand on this little project much as I'd love to...

 

I'm not saying $1000. If you looked on eBay you will see you can pick up decent Dell R710's or even a Dell R610 for about US$250. If you're going to co-locate then often a Dell R610 is a better option as it is only 1U, and you can pay by the rack space in some DC's.

 

e.g: $230 http://www.ebay.com/itm/DELL-PowerEdge-R610-Server-8-Core-32GB-RAM-2x-146GB-SAS-/192230399229

and ideally you'd want to install to an SSD which you can get models like Kingston's or Crucial's for a good price. e.g $52 for a 120GB V400 https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Digital-120GB-SA400S37-120G/dp/B01N6JQS8C

 

so $280 total + cost of hosting if you're going to colo it.

So would be 8C/16T of processing, 32GB ram, 120GB SSD for OS and game server installs, RAID0 the 146GB disks for backups., redundant PSU's.

[Taalii]

2 hours ago, Jarsky said:

 

I'm not saying $1000. If you looked on eBay you will see you can pick up decent Dell R710's or even a Dell R610 for about US$250. If you're going to co-locate then often a Dell R610 is a better option as it is only 1U, and you can pay by the rack space in some DC's.

 

e.g: $230 http://www.ebay.com/itm/DELL-PowerEdge-R610-Server-8-Core-32GB-RAM-2x-146GB-SAS-/192230399229

and ideally you'd want to install to an SSD which you can get models like Kingston's or Crucial's for a good price. e.g $52 for a 120GB V400 https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Digital-120GB-SA400S37-120G/dp/B01N6JQS8C

 

so $280 total + cost of hosting if you're going to colo it.

So would be 8C/16T of processing, 32GB ram, 120GB SSD for OS and game server installs, RAID0 the 146GB disks for backups., redundant PSU's.

So sub-300 for a server.  That;s a good number.  Thank you.

[Electronics Wizardy]

5 hours ago, Taalii said:

So sub-300 for a server.  That;s a good number.  Thank you.

thing is these prices are counting the extra power your paying for or network, or time to keep it up.

 

Whats your internet connection? Do you have a static IP? How fast and what latency. The internet in data centers is much better than your home internet.