Looking for help/guidance on how to setup a server for a business
Looking for help/guidance on how to setup a server for a business
Hi. Some friends of mine are starting a business and they want to setup a server to host a simple "contact" website, run an e-mail service (about 10 accounts for now but with possibilities of expanding it to support more) and to store and remote access documents.
Im a computer savvy person so they asked me for help, but dont know much about self-hosting so I come here asking you:
What kind of hardware do they need and would be best?
What OS and other software is required and recomended?
How to set it up/configure it? Im partial to foss but if there are good propietary options they are acceptable too.
And last: What do we have to watch out for or avoid.
Also, space is a bit of an issue, I was thinking they could use something small like an intel nuc but Im worried that hardware would be underpowered for their needs.
I have been googling for stuff myself but I get overwhelmed by the ammount of information and some contradicting opinions so I appreciate your recomendations and guidance. Im not asking you to give me a full tutorial, although I would appreciate it too, but just to be pointed in the right direction to avoid, as much as possible, spending money and time on things they might not really need or might not perform as well.
Thanks in advance.
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So don't take this as rude, but if none of you have experience running email for a business, you're probably better off contracting that part out.
It's a lot of work to get working, keep working, and is prone to exploding for no particular reason so if this is a business-critical component, it's worth the $20 a month to get it hosted where making your email actually deliver to people's inbox is someone else's problem.
Same for the business website: if it being down is going to cost money, a simple static page like that is hostable for literally free with cloudflare or netlify or any of a couple of other providers, and that's probably what I'd do. (And, frankly, is what I do with a lot of stuff I host.)
As for storing and accessing remote documents, if you pay for gsuite or office365, you'll get that included in the price, so like uh, that might be the best way to go.
I know this is literally not what you asked, but....
and email can be hosted sooo cheap these times. My ionos contract just to have my own domain costs me maybe 10€ per month.
So don't take this as rude I know this is literally not what you asked, but...
No no no, this is the exact reason I asked. I honestly thought selfhosting would be better and easier once its all set up. Thank you very much.
As far as I know the website is not an indispensable part of the business but its not a static page either. Its gonna be like a landing page to (hype up the business), some catalogue pages to show their products, and a page with contact info (maybe also an "about us" page. Its mainly to look more professional and to have a bit of an internet presence. What would you recommend for that? Either selfhosted or commercial solution.
Thanks again.
Just btw, your requirements for the website would work just fine on a static site. A static site just means the server only serves the website and nothing else. No DBs or anything like that.
Good to know, thanks.
I'm going to get downvoted to hell for this but uh, I usually tell clients Squarespace is what they want these days.
Self-hosting something like Wordpress or Ghost or Drupal or Joomla or whatever CMS you care to name costs time: you have to patch it, back it up, and do a lot of babysitting to keep it up and secure and running. It's very much not a ship-and-forget - really, nothing selfhosting is.
I'm very firmly of the opinion that small business people should be focused on their business, not their email or website or whatever, because any time you spend fighting your tech stack is time you could have been actually making money. It's all a cost, it just depends if you value $20 a month or your time more.
If I had someone come to me asking to setup this stuff for their business, I'd absolutely tell them to use gSuite for email, file sharing, documents, and such and Squarespace for the website and then not worry about shit, because they're both reliable and do what they say on the tin.
As an employee of an MSP it's sometimes really annoying how some smaller one-man-army + employee MSPs do "crafty" setups on site and meaningless firewall rules to work against.
Will look into square space, thanks.
It sucks, but as someone who hosts their own services and supports business clients: If they have a budget, Office365 all the way. Does it suck paying money to M$? Oh hell yeah. But it's a 'cost of doing business'. Don't screw around if they can afford it, just go O365 :(
I understand the ease from an admin POV, but besides locking users into a third party, corporate suite, everything UX about Office365 sucks balls.
Agreed. But stability and reliability would be a priority for this so like emuspawn said "cost of doing business" :c
Will look into it. Thanks!
Agreed. For businesses, spend the couple bucks to have Microsoft or whoever put their huge resources behind keeping you online. It's a lot better than having the server with all your services go down when you're expecting an important email.
That seems to be the consensus. Thanks!
Everything in this reply is correct.
To add; You can't run a business' infrastructure from recommendations on a forum, most especially email. There's a ton you'd need to learn about hardware, networking, DNS, email services (as in daemons that run ontl the server), and interoperability between your services and whoever is being communicated with (including RBL and other elements of sender reputation). If you're not a full-time admin, even attempting to recommend an on-prem solution (of any kind/complexity) is an incredibly bad idea.
Source: I'm an admin for a living, specializing in internet facing systems and their security.
Source addendum: I have been offered a shitload of money to set up and maintain an in-house email system (in their case; setting up a mass email system akin to Sendgrid or AWS SES), and spent a significant amount of time describing to the offering party why it's a terrible idea and they don't want to deal with it. I know that in your case you're talking about simple business email accounts, but it's a comparable level of bullshit (just on a different scale).