I am look at buying or building a server and was wondering what I should exactly look for in it. I’m going to be using it for running game servers and maybe hosting a website if I can do it, nothing high traffic though. Also I would like to know if it is better to use Ubuntu or say windows XP for what I’m doing. Any and all help would be appreciated.
And maybe I'm just missing it or is there no place for specify server based topics?
Well from the outline, sounds like you want a high performance system. The system specs depend on what sort of things you want to run. Do the game servers you plan to run benefit from multiple cores, high frequency cores or both? You've also got to think about RAM requirements. Pretty much any machine can be run as a server, but enterprise grade hardware is designed to run underload for long periods of time and to have a long MTF.
Linux is better to run as a server as it is generally more stable. Ubuntu is a good one to start at, though you may want to try just a pure debian. As it carries less crap. But this also depends on your needs. As you may require the windows kernel for certain applications.
To help you further more information is required. Research into the requirements needed of the planned system, will greatly help you decide what you require.
- zanginator
I hate to say it but looking at local listings and craigslist can end up getting you some half decent second hand server equipment. I picked up a 2x Opteron 285, 8gb ram etc. for free from a guy that is currently hosting a couple Minecraft servers, an FTP, and an Apache server. You really don't need a whole lot just for hosting. It's always best to use linux for servers and ubuntu is easy enough. But if it's your first time and you aren't used to it, Windows Server 20XX is always an option. Atainable through the purchase of an overpriced key, or via thepiratebay.
Either way what matters with server is mostly RAM and some CPU. Anything over 2ghz will handle about all you can throw at a server and how much ram to get is reliant on how many different things you plan to have running on it at a time. Yes I know ghz isn't the best way to judge but you get what I mean.
If you're going full on server then ECC ram isn't a bad option since it's error correcting it'll prevent some blue screens and crashes to give you better reliability and up time. I believe some AM3+ motherboards support it, if I recall I heard Gigabyte's am3+ do so that might be worth looking in to but I'd double check on all that first.