I know this is a seemingly silly question but hear me out...
I'm after a small server that can run... you guessed it... Minecraft!! :P As well as a few other things.
Only about 5 - 10 people will play on it at a time and I have fiber broadband so bandwidth isn't an issue. Other than that, I hope to use it as a home backup server and remote file server.
I currently have a Asus U36SG that I don't really use since having built my PC. Once in a while it's handy of course if I screw something up on my main rig.
My question is, what would make more sense? Selling my laptop and building a server? or just using the laptop. (Assuming cost works out even)
As it will be on all the time and the fact that it's a consumer grade, though rock solid, laptop, I don't want to prematurely kill it.
My plan was to keep it next to my router on it's side so it always got fresh air. I'd clean the dust out once in a while and the fact that it's quiet will help my brother to work who will have to sit right next to it :P.
I've been looking at some of the cheap used servers floating around on ebay. As good as the dual Xeons and 16GB DDR2 machines look, I've read that the aren't fantastic to run any game servers as they are quite old. I was thinking more of an ITX box of some kind. What do you guys think?
The specs of my laptop are:
i5 2450
8GB DDR3 1333MHz
nvidia GT610m
256GB Samsung 830 series ssd
I'll tell you right away you don't need a server hardware for a Minecraft server and backups. I run my home server (Website, Music/Video Streaming, RDP, and FTP), all from a FX-4100 CPU with a cheap MSI motherboard. The only time the server ever goes down is when Minecraft updates... Which seems to be quite often unfortunately I would highly recommend not using Windows as your server OS because that will also be a high point of failure. My actuall physical machine has not seen downtime in the past 6 months, which the reason why it was down is because I physically moved the machine to a different room. Now your laptop will be fine for a Minecraft server, nice specs, however it does not have RAID. I would keep a SSD for a boot drive on a server and some sort of RAID on high capacity hard drives. Let me know if you have any other questions.
Thanks for the reply. Hardware reliability was my main concern so at least that shouldn't be a problem. I'm not sure how I'll get raid on my machine as it only has one drive bay. The best I could do would be a USB3 external drive or a separate NAS. I don't have a monstrous amount of data, in fact all I'd keep on there would only come up to around 60 - 70GB at most. An idea could be to partition the SSD for boot and data?
I was thinking of using FreeBSD to do everything on the server side of things. Might keep a small windows partition on there anyway if I can for the sake of it being a laptop.
Sell laptop, build destop, buy a servercraft host for the server?
I already host a server on Fragnet. It costs around £10 per month for 768MB of ram. The problem is that the client I use is heavly modified so the 8GB in my laptop would be great for it. Also the server isn't used enough to justify the cost of a host with more ram.
Yeah definitely host the minecraft server on your own machine. You will have full control over it and can do anything you want. Just make sure you have a decent internet connection and you should be good to go. Also buy a domain from somewhere that you router supports for Dynamic DNS configurations.
but why not both? (thats what i did sorta)
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