Posts filled under: testing

New Local Server

I love my Rackspace Cloud servers, but I’ve been thinking I need a local server where I can have complete control, there isn’t a monthly charge and their isn’t an additional fee if I want to use RHEL or Windows. I had to ask myself some questions that at times were hard to answer due to the fact that I wanted the server to have a small form factor (traditional micro and mini tower’s were too large), not require a server rack and be easy to upgrade.

The Questions I Asked Myself

What do I actually need this server to handle?: PHP, Ruby, MySQL and Python

How fast do I want this server to be?: Memory wise I wanted to have at least 4GB’s of RAM with the option to add more. Processor wise I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted, I was thinking around 2.8-3.0Ghz

Which brand do I want?: I was looking at Dell or HP since a lot of companies use them for their web servers. I also looked at IBM and Lenovo, neither were in my price range.

Which OS do I want?: This is where my choice became difficult, I wanted Ubuntu and most computer companies ship computers with Windows (even servers). I don’t want Windows, I won’t use it and why should I have to pay for it when I’m going to put Ubuntu on it?

The Decision

At the end of the day I had bounced between Dell, HP, Lenovo and IBM’s websites a lot comparing servers and even standard desktops, after all of the comparing I couldn’t pick one to order that wasn’t going to make me regret it. This is a big business decision after all, I can’t just trash this after a week and create another like I can with a cloud server, I’m stuck with this thing until either it’s EOL (determined by it’s components) or until I sell it and get something better.

My final decision was to build my own, this had it’s own issues because I really wanted the Habey RPC-800 server chassis, but it’s a rack mounted chassis and I would have needed to buy a small rack too. I ended up going with a Shuttle barebones kit since it meets my needs (small, upgradable, desktop ready) and it was relatively inexpensive. Below is a breakdown of what my server will have once it all arrives and I install everything.

The Breakdown

I bought everything at NewEgg because they had everything there and I didn’t want to rack up a bunch of shipping fees from different places. The Shuttle chassis has a motherboard that required an iX processor from Intel, I really wanted just a Core 2 Duo but in order to get the memory in it I wanted I would have had to spend about $500 on the chassis alone. I went with a 3.2Ghz i3-550 Clarkdale because it was only $8-9 more than the 3.0Ghz one and I needed a i3-5xx series in order to use the internal video outputs. I opted for two 320GB HDD’s because I’m going to set them up as a RAID-1 array so I have a complete backup. The memory was an easy choice, I put Kingston RAM in my MacBook Pro and haven’t had any issues, so it made sense to go in my server. This server actually supports 16GB’s of RAM, but to save money I opted for only 8GB’s now. I can always pick up more RAM at a later date.

So, how much did this cost? $590.62. My original goal was a $200-300 system but once I realized it was going to be much more to get the pre-built system I wanted from one of the major companies it’s not a bad price at all. If we look at how much a Rackspace Cloud server costs with comparable memory and storage we’re looking at $0.48/hr or $350.40/month; so at the current setup it’s the same as running a 8GB cloud server for 1.7 months. When I upgrade to 16GB’s of memory, it’s going to cost me about another $100.00 which makes my total $690.62 for the system. If I was running the maxed out cloud server for one month it would be $700.80, so I actually save $10.18. if you figure in running that same maxed out server for a year that’s $8,409.60 which saves me $7,718.98 in just a single year.

Everything should be here by the end of the week so I should have a new local Ubuntu server running by Monday.

∞Posted on April 13, 2011

Tags: local server,server,development,testing,Ubuntu,