What is a Server?

Besides getting a refill of your favorite beverage, a server is a computer or computer program that manages access to a centralized resource or service in a network. Here is how they work…

These icons represent 3 of the numerous types of servers that are available today.

Overview

Servers are a wonderfully designed sophisticated computer. People frequently think a server is something far different than that of your typical home desktop computer when in fact it is nothing more than a slightly more developed computer. They may look different. Some take the appearance of a electronic boxes weighing ounces to large rack mounted behemoth that can exceed 150LBS. Servers perform a multitude of tasks from simple file storage to running a phone system to hosting software applications and more. Servers are a desirable piece of equipment because they give you redundancy not only when it comes to storage but redundant processors, redundant memory and redundant power supplies. They are a safe place to host your files and software applications.

Servers for Data Safety

If you have documents, music, pictures or other important data that is important to you then protecting it should be of vital importance to you. A properly formatted and correctly formatted network attached storage device or a server can serve that purpose. Desktop and laptop hard drives can crash. With a server redundancy is key. Should a drive, power supply, ram or processor fail, you (or your IT professional) would be notified and efforts to secure the server can be made. Its about prevention of data loss NOT sunshine and unicorns!

Servers at Home

People often roll their eyes at the suggestion 0f putting a server in their home. With pictures, videos and other important data that can not be replaced keeping one copy on a flash drive or a dvd/cd is absurd! Flash drives can be lost/stolen, cd/dvds can be easily scratched and rendered useless, External hard drives can be dropped and crash. Servers are generally kept in a cool dry location away from children and pets. Drive crashes are possible but with redundant disks… you are protected.

Servers for Small Business

The misconception of many business owners is that they do not need a server because all they do is generate excel spreadsheets or simple word documents. FALSE. Those excel spreadsheets and word documents are important to the viability of your business, Right? Then why are you not keeping them centralized and on a secure server? If all of the company files are on one laptop or desktop and that computer gets infected with ransomware or the drive crashes… what will happen to your business the remainder of that day? What will happen in the following week while data recovery efforts and computer repair are underway? A server will allow you to shut down all of the computers in your business and access those files (with or without a password) from any computer on the premises (or remotely with the proper setup).

Pros and Cons

Pros: Servers secure data and reduce the risk of data loss. You can set the server up wherever and however you would like. Servers can perform multiple tasks. Strongly reduced risk of data loss.

Cons: Upfront expense. They consume more electricity. Servers can be noisy.

Price and Operating Costs

Servers can range in price from as low as $389 to hundreds of thousands of dollars. While the average home/small-medium sized business does not need a server that is valued at several thousand dollars these power house servers do exist. From experience I can tell you that once we started to turn on servers at WeldonPC our electric bill started to climb slightly once we started running some of the bigger servers on a constant basis. Each small server costs $20-$60 per month in electricity and the larger servers (with nearly 35 hard drives) costs about $140 per month. We have found the added cost of our servers to be worth using. We host 10 client backup servers, 2 vm servers (virtual machines) which we will cover in another article & video, and 2 cloud servers. The cloud servers are the backup servers for our clients when they are at home/work. Their data gets uploaded to our server. It saves our clients from the need of performing backups at their home or office.

If you are interested in a server or would like more information on servers please feel free to email info@weldonpc.com OR call 216-475-0661. Thank you for reading. Please share this article!