quote:

Originally posted by mark123:

quote:

Originally posted by ensigmatic:
Well, you don't necessarily need to run it on hardware in your possession ...

It just gets cost prohibitive considering the amount of storage I'd need. If I have a physical server on site, I can just drop a new drive in it and go.

Good point. Though I'd never use a drive, considering your comments below. I'd do a minimum of RAID 1.

quote:

Originally posted by mark123:

quote:

Originally posted by ensigmatic:
What services do you need said server to supply? Apparently you need a web server. For a business Internet site? Why do you need PHP and MySQL?

Web site serving specifically ASP.NET MVC (I'm running 11 distinct web sites on my current host)

I don't know ASP.NET MVC at all, but, doing a bit of searching, it would seem ASP.NET MVC is deprecated and replaced by ASP.NET Core, which apparently runs on a variety of Linuxen.

Microsoft became a lot more Linux-friendly starting about three years ago or so.

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Originally posted by mark123:
Email (I have 22 email accounts and 332 forwarders on my current host)

Trivial with Postfix under Linux. But there would be a learning curve and it's not administered with a point-and-drool GUI. (Though there may be packages that leverage Postfix, a database, PHP or Python, and GUI tools. I don't know, since I've never needed anything like that.)

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Originally posted by mark123:
I currently run a few Wordpress sites and I'd need the PHP to run them until I transition them back to .NET.

Or, if you go with a Linux distro: Just stick with PHP.

It seems like perhaps an Ubuntu LTS release, with the appropriate added-on packages, might suit your needs. Set it up using Linux RAID (mdadm) and the LVM (logical volume manager) for flexibility.

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Originally posted by smschulz:
I would never run an email server (in my case Exchange) and a SQL server on the same instance.

Just out of curiosity's sake: Why is that? I know why it used to be contraindicated, but haven't kept up.

From Day One, running SCO Xenix on "commodity" hardware and Unix SVR3 on Motorola Delta servers, through running Sun Microsystems SPARC Solaris servers, through running various Linuxen and FreeBSD servers: I never once had a problem running multiple services on the same server, either from a resources or from a privilege separation perspective.

If cost is an issue, you can look into running Linux on a Raspberry Pi. I got a web server up and running in just a couple of hours. It's no speed demon, but for a simple, low-volume solution, it's workable.