Low-Powered Personal Servers?

antifoidulus asks: "Being the proud owner of a PowerBook, I have but one complaint when it comes to my computing experience: the lack of an 'always-on' web/database server that would allow me to work on some personal programming projects, since I don't like having my PowerBook on 24/7. I could just buy an Intel box, but looking at some of the horror stories of how much power P4s consume, and living in Germany where electricity is not cheap, I wanted to see what suggestions the Slashdot community has for low-cost, low-power, headless servers. My only requirements are that it can run Linux and preferably cost less than $500. Is this possible? What architecture should I go with?"

Comments

Localhost

[Alethes]

Is there any reason you can't run the web and database servers locally on your laptop so that it's always available when you need it, but not using power otherwise?

These mini-itx solutiions are pretty cool but

[cypherz]

why not pick up the USD 499 Mac Mini? Mine is working just fine as a small server.

xbox?

[Anubis350]

an xbox running debian with a bigger HD...?

Re:Three words: Mac mini !

[ldspartan]

* I've been using Linux since 1998 but every time I put together a box I can never get everything working at once. My last attempt with Fedora resulted in a box with PHP and MySQL, but PHP did not have something it needed to talk to MySQL. Another box had PHP and MySQL but something else didn't want to take, and so on, and so on.

Have you considered that, perhaps, despite using linux for 7 years, you're bad at it?

Use a hosting provider

[Decker-Mage]

Unless you need the server experience for some reason, I have no idea why are going to spend all that money, including recurring costs such as power and replacement parts as the machine ages, just to do your web projects. For less than $30 per month you can find some hosting provider with the right mix of features for you. Heck, mine provides every bell and whistle you can think of from .NET/SQL Server 2000 on down on the MS side and PHP/MySQL/etc. on the FOSS side for the same account, 20 GB of space, and 2 GB of traffic a month. That's what I use for my projects as it's flexible as hell. Furthermore since I'm hosted, via my reseller, at iPlanet, I don't think I'll have any downtime in the next millennium ;-). Many of the hosting providers for LAMPs based systems even provide a command line and even more space.

Economically it makes no sense to go any other way unless there is an overriding reason to do so. Push the security updates, costs, and maintenance off to someone else.

Re:mini-itx

[slaker]

I don't know what the poster's requirements for fileserving are, but many miniITX solutions have only one IDE port on-board. Granted, these days you can stick a couple 500GB drives on something and call it a day, but that's the thing that keeps me away from it as a platform.

If the disk subsystem is an issue, I'd suggest something in an Athlon mobile or Athlon64 mobile. Low power, noise and heat, combined with modern and full-featured system boards AND a CPU that's up for real work if need be (and if not, it'll throttle back to 500ish MHz). Plus the mobile chips are surprisingly cheap.