Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Dedicated Server : Building a Home Server Recomendations

[Sol3141]

Hi all, I'm new to the forum and this is my first post, so please be kind. =P

Anyway I'm looking to set up a server at home as a learning experience. I plan to have have it providing local FTP and general file hosting, external and internal media streaming (internal would be mostly videos while external would be a live streaming of music and video hopefully with chat and voice), and web hosting for a personal website.

Anyway I'm looking for recommendations on the hardware that would be required, I'm well aware of the network requirements but I have little experience with the processing aspect and am unsure of what would be required. I'm thinking of building an i5 or xeon unit with 4gigs ddr3 and setting up the storage in a raid 10 configuration. my budget is about 300$ at the moment.

Would I be better off with the i5 or the xeon, or would i be better off going with another processor?

Any input would be appreciated. Thanks.

[FRCorey]

The I5 will be better at single thread tasks vs the Xeon and will likely be a lot cheaper. Any old PC could do the job, as long as you're not transcoding video you won't need a huge processor.

[Exerox]

Your internal needs sound fine, although the external plans raise questions for me.

4gb ddr3 is a lot for a home server, wired streaming of audio/video wouldn't use much RAM at all without instant transcoding or a bloated media manager being used. Also raid 10 is a lot of protection for a home setup, have you considered any other mirroring method or raid setup?

As for networking, that's up to you but if the hosted personal site is important you may want a specific connection port/pipe in your server location, what kind of connectivity are you looking at using?



D.

[RSNET-John]

Originally Posted by FRCorey

The I5 will be better at single thread tasks vs the Xeon and will likely be a lot cheaper. Any old PC could do the job, as long as you're not transcoding video you won't need a huge processor.

What sort of Xeon? It's impossible to claim such a thing without knowing the generation and model.

[fdmu876]

Originally Posted by Sol3141

external and internal media streaming (internal would be mostly videos while external would be a live streaming of music and video hopefully with chat and voice),

external video with chat and voice? do you mean like streaming to the website or just for personal use? i find it wierd to include a chat for personal use.