Hey guys. I like the idea of a home server later in life when my fiancee and I find a house together and settle in. The thing is, I don't really know how to set one up, how they work, really anything about servers and how they work. If anybody can explain them to me I would be very grateful. Thanks guys.
First things first, what do you mean by a home server? If you want something to store photos, movies, music etc so you can access them over your home network, then I'd suggest you want to explore a NAS solution rather than a server. Network Attached Storage is essentially a hard drive built into a computer that can easily communicate with networked devices to stream files.
However, if you want to play games with friends and/or share files with people outside of your home network, then you may need a proper server. If so, you could get yourself a server and run it from your home, but you would have to costs of running a high power machine 24/7, as well as needing an expensive, high-speed internet connection (probably fibre) which has no usage limits on the amount of data you transfer.
There's not much more helpful input that can be provided until you can tell us whether you want something for storing files for you and your fiancee or whether you want an actual server for more than that.
I think a nas would work for my fiancee and I, but I am imaging by this time I won't be in the same city as my friend that I do a ton of music production with. We can have some pretty large files so I'm not sure if a server would be beneficial or not. My friends and I do also game a lot together, most of them living across the state now at college and what not. I hope this helps.
Hmmm. I can see what you're saying here. Depending upon your income, have you considered getting a NAS for you and your fiancee, and then either renting a game server for you and some friends? Might I also suggest exploring services like DropBox for sharing files, as you can get an awful lot of storage for a monthly subscription. Google Drive is also pretty good. However, if you decided to get a server for your home, I would strongly recommend a high-speed fibre data plan if you want to share large files with people, and set up an external access system so they can log in to the file system with a username and password.