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Don't spout FUD. If someone is actually suited by using a Mac Mini server, they would be totally fine with the lowest tier Windows Small Biz Server. Which up to a certain number of users, doesn't have CALs to pay. And don't use the excuse of factoring in cost of upgrades from version to version because OSX has the same treadmill.

From MS itself:MS disagrees with you. Base price for 2008 Small Business server is $1,089 with 5 users/devices. Additional users is $77 per user or you can buy them in packs. Either way, you are paying more than for OS X. I'm sure where this "No CAL required" version is but it's not listed in the pricing. The cheapest server I could find is $469 Web Server version only (no users).

A main problem with true comparison is that MS has so many options that it takes a Windows Server expert just to figure which one your business may need. If you get it wrong, you'll have to pay for upgrades and go to the trouble of upgrading/re-intalling Windows. With Snow Leopard Server, there is only the unlimited user version.

And I'm not sure what that last sentence means. Everyone has to pay for upgrades when it comes to commercial OS. Unlike Apple, if you are a large enough company you might negotiate with MS to get a better deal than the list price. Also most SA licenses normally come with upgrade discounts. With Apple it is the same price for everyone.

f anything, a really small business should be paying for certain hostings. Good ones are inexpensive for what you get and run by professionals. When it gets to a certain size, you can run proper servers by hiring an admin and then YOU CAN USE LINUX.

Not everyone who needs a server requires hosting. You need hosting if you require external web services. If you only need an internal database server, a file server, basically anything that needs to be kept internal. Yes if your company is large enough, you should hire an admin. But most small businesses are typically less than 50 employees and only a handful of them may use a computer. These businesses need server expertise but don't have the money to hire and maintain a server infrastructure.

Friends don't let friends use OSX as a server.

There are many, many businesses that use OS X server. Some co-location businesses like Cybermill and Server Logisitics use both X-Serves and Mac Minis as servers. Some businesses may use OS X server if they have a large number of Macs as it integrates well with them. Your statement would be the same as if you said: "Friends don't let friends use Windows as a server." "Friends don't let friends use Linux as a server." "Friends don't let friends use Unix as a server." All of these different OS's have a place.

Here you go:

Don't know about VPS ...

Server Logistics, Inc.:

http://www.serverlogistics.com/

Macminicolo:

http://www.macminicolo.net/macmini.html

I used to lease a dedicated box, and over the years, I was faced with this decision to switch to another provider on 4 separate occasions. A similar situation, they weren't always asking for the root password, but in each instance, there were hardware problems crashing the box, and they would play ring around the rosies fixing it, and my family's business was losing business and credibility. I understand the problem, for $200/mo. for a dedicated box, a company can't afford to have a gaggle of techs so they can provide 4 hour response time, and have hot spare boxes ready to roll into place.

We decided we could no longer employ "hosting provider roulette" as part of a reasonable business plan.

I found a data center not exactly close to home but within a reasonable distance, near Downtown L.A., that had a reasonable colocation rate. We put together a 1U box, and put it in the rack. For $125/mo (~$40/mo. less than we were paying for an inferior dedicated box) our down time has all but disappeared. The thing is, whenever the down time was because of the hardware, I was able to drive down there and swap stuff around, including swapping in a tower for a time while I had to send our server out for repair. Our down time profile changed from multi-week periods of unreliable service to brief windows of usually less than an hour though one time about 4 hours while I had to drive around town rounding up some new drives once.

Another thing we got out of this move was the ability to configure our box as we pleased. We upgraded out box to an 8 core box with 24GB of RAM and a 1.3TB RAID 10 array. Leasing a box like that is cost prohibitive. And the time to do this was minimal, I just ordered the parts from Newegg, built it, burned it in, and went down to perform the swap. They didn't quibble about me having two machines hooked up for a day while I made the swap.

The "company" that runs the data center is actually a few companies sharing a space, and they help each other out covering tech support at night. They are all 100% top-notch geeks, who understand the problems a web admin faces, and they are very accommodating. They will put an IP KVM on the box or even wheel up a head, plug it in, and tell you what the screen is saying, even help diagnose, all for no additional charge. You can hire them to be a monkey by the hour, if needed, or just go there 24x7x365 on a moment's notice, to access the data center, which is secured, has halon, backup chillers, redundant power and backbone feeds, UPS, diesel generator, etc. all the amenities. I get nothing from them except goodwill for my recommendation. I can tell you I have never once in the 6 years I have colocated a box with time, have I ever considered moving. For anything. Not even the cloud could beckon me away. If anyone is interested: http://colocation.la/ also http://serverlogistics.com/ if you are interested in shared or dedicated hosting.

O'Reilly's (no relation) has a great site for Mac tech/programming at MacDevCenter.

Also, Server Logistics, a Mac based web hosting company with cred, offers pre-packed mySQL for free. Gotta love that Aaron Faby.

O'Reilly's (no relation) has a great site for Mac tech/programming at MacDevCenter.

Also, Server Logistics, a Mac based web hosting company with cred, offers pre-packed mySQL for free. Gotta love that Aaron Faby.

While I agree with you about the benfits of Linux on low cost PCs - your coment about mac hosting only proves you havent looked very hard.

One strength that this book has over many similar ones is that the author explains up front how to install PHP and MySQL, rather than relegating these topics to an appendix, or skipping them entirely

Setup Instructions:
1. Use an Apple Computer
2. Download Aaron Faby's packages (and tip him a few bucks)
3. Install (i.e. click 'continue' until the screens go away)

Simple! .....but I guess I'm assuming a few things here...... =)

is not difficult

.
-shpoffo

For others, I would like to point out the Server Logistics Complete Web Server series. It is the best I have found for getting a fully-functional and up-to-date LAMP environment on Mac OS X. It includes .pkg-based seamless installers for Apache 2, PHP 4 with loads of extensions, MySQL 4, and Tomcat 4. There are even prefpanes for Apache, MySQL, and Tomcat, detailed instructions and manuals for everything, and all free. Oh, and they all automagically work with each other out of the box. No, I don't work for Server Logistics. Anyways, check them all out here.

Definitely give Fink a try for handling most of the packages that OS X is missing. I haven't tried Gentoo for Mac OS X yet - it writes directly into your / instead of /sw so I might wait until it stabilizes a bit before giving that a try.

ServerLogistics' Complete * packages are also great.

According to this PDF from Apple, Mac OS X Server already carries both Apache 1.3 and 2.x. If you only have OS X client, you can also download a bundled Apache 2 package from Server Logistics here, if you really want it. I tried it about a year ago, I remember it has a nice preferance pane with which you can change some settings, restart the server, and view and edit your httpd.conf (although it was a little buggy with saving the file, TextEdit had problems with the permissions)... It couldn't do anything that wasn't just as easy to do from the command line, though.

You can also get packages here

Huh?

Apache comes preinstalled on OS X, regardless of whether it is the server version or "desktop" version. PHP is available as a package here and mysql here. PHP doesn't require much configuration in itself, same goes for mysql beyond creating databases which you have to do on either platform.

And yes indeed Mac OS X has two versions. But windows has 3. Home, Pro, and Server. But which one to use for desktop use is somewhat confusing on the windows side. XP Pro offers a few useful features, but they don't really justify increasing the cost. Mac OS X in all but a few cases cheaper than XP Pro or Home (home upgrade may be cheaper, but there are many sources that sell OS X for $100 instead of the msrp).

On top of that, we have no serial numbers, no product activation, and the install discs no matter which apple machine they were bundled with will install on any other apple machine (so long as that particular OS revision runs on the hardware).