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On Wed, 2010-03-24 at 12:48 +0000, Gibbs wrote: > I work for a small online business (only 2 of us) and we're looking to > get a reasonably priced server. At the moment we have lots of projects > (websites etc) running from my PC and it's getting very slow. We also > have to keep the PC online 24/7 which is a nuissance. > > Can anyone recommend a decent place to find servers? As it's a small > business I think a small and cheap server should suffice initially but > I really don't know where to start. In case anyone is wondering the > server will be used locally so it's not for hosting purposes etc. Dell sell a lot of small servers to a lot of people and firms for not really very much. Start off with your backup solution, I suggest encrypted transfer using rsync to a machine in another building, over the Internet, but a more usual solution would be to buy a tape drive and lots of tapes. Then consider whether you need two drives mirroring each other, so taht instead of restoring from backup to a new drive you can pull the dead one out, slot a new one in a day or so later, and remirror the good one to the new one. You may not need that, but they are cheap. If you do you'll want some sort of RAID card/driver in the server I think. If you want to have a system drive and a data drive then you may find you are doubling up each, for a small setup don't get too complicated. Then consider whether you want the thing to store - to do file serving - or whether you want to have a desktop on it, for each or several users, which you bring to your own desk or elsewhere each time you resume work. Do you want it to handle mail and so on - usually people seem to but not always. Have a look at Dell. Start at their cheapest PowerEdge, look for the Linux option, remove anything you don't need (one USB floppy drive in the building seems sufficient to me, for instance, and one might take a similar view on DVD/CD drives. If you want desktops then you want more than the minimum RAM in it, but not silly amounts unless your life is very complicated. Also look at tiny little low power network applainces, that are intended only to do storage. They may be sufficient. -- A -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html