First Server Build - Hardware Guidelines

[hughesjs]

Evening,

 

So, I'm pretty familiar with the basics of building computers. I've built a number of desktop systems of all levels over the years. However, the time has come to build my first server (I'm planning on reselling it's resources in VPS form).

 

What hardware (in vague terms) would you recommend that I purchase to maximise my bang for buck: where can I (and where can't I) afford to skimp.

 

Cheers!

[.Ocean]

Selling time or services on a server is tough for a home gamer because clients get VERY upset when there is downtime. However, I would recommend instead of building one on your own I would say just buy some cheap used enterprise server gear off of ebay. If you look around you can find some already put together computers for a really good price.

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, hughesjs said:

r (I'm planning on reselling it's resources in VPS form).

Don't bother, its a pain to compete with people like aws and google cloud. There cheaper, they have a name, they have uptime, they have as much computing power that you could want.

 

Whats budget are you thinking?

 

Id look at a dell r720 .

[hughesjs]

5 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Don't bother, its a pain to compete with people like aws and google cloud. There cheaper, they have a name, they have uptime, they have as much computing power that you could want.

 

Whats budget are you thinking?

 

Id look at a dell r720 .

Recently found out that my VPS provider (epichosts) is doing this exact same thing and I've got plenty of experience with the relevant technologies to run it.

 

I won't be running it out of my back room, I plan on renting rackspace in a datacentre which should help with the uptime.

 

My budget is <£10k.

 

I certainly won't be giving up my day job either...

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 minutes ago, hughesjs said:

Recently found out that my VPS provider (epichosts) is doing this exact same thing and I've got plenty of experience with the relevant technologies to run it.

 

I won't be running it out of my back room, I plan on renting rackspace in a datacentre which should help with the uptime.

 

My budget is <£10k.

 

I certainly won't be giving up my day job either...

Id then look at used dell r720 or r730's. Put ovirt, proxmox or esxi on them, Set a shared ssd storage for boot, and maybe a big hdd array with something like a sa120 for mass storage.

[Jarsky]

I'll just point out that typically you'd want to be selling to a niche a particular service, there isn't much space in the way of general VPS reselling. 

A friend for example does seedboxes and plex servers and does pretty damn well off that.

I used to resell game servers, so I would sell a base installed/configured game, and access to a management panel i created for them to start/stop and manage the config of their game server. 

General purpose VPS though, typically you have things like AWS, Azure, OVH, DigitalOceans, HostGator, etc...filling that space. 

 

 

You have the right idea using a datacentre, but you might want to check and see what reseller services they offer - because you have things to think about such as 

Routing & IP Configuration

Firewall Configuration

Virus & Threat Management

DDoS Prevention

etc...