Mac Mini and OSX Server. benefits?

Before you spend the money on an Mac Mini Server check to see if a Synology NAS will fit your needs.

As a bonus Synology has popular forum software packages available as a plug in.

I use my mini & server to host time machine backups for our macbooks in the house, Also it servers a a hub for all our data. I run crashplan to kep the data backup off site.

Macs4u said:

Hi,
Also i plan on hosting a forum, and im led to believe that you can host your own websites using osx server.

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You can host your own websites using OSX desktop. Or Linux. Or Windows. The commonly-used webservers run on just about any OS. OSX Server is irrelevant to being able to host websites.

OSX Server gives you some nice GUI tools for managing your web server and other servers. And also less-than-fresh versions of those servers. There's nothing that comes with OSX Server that you can't install yourself. (Save for maybe some proprietary GUI admin tools.)

But I don't recommend it for other reasons (see below).

My internet speed at home is 47mb down and 5mb up.

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Exactly the opposite of what you need. You need high bandwidth up, and don't have much need for high bandwidth down. (Unless you expect users to upload large files.)

Plus, it would probably violate your Internet service Terms of Service, and they are likely blocking Port 80 inbound.

You can usually pay a higher rate for "business" service, but it's generally much cheaper just to use a VPS.

It's almost never a good idea to host websites in your home or office.

Last office I worked at where it made sense to host in-house was Sony San Diego Studio. But they have a direct connection to a high-bandwidth fibre ring with many Tier 1 carriers, and are next-door to an ISP who is in the same office park to make use of the same fibres. Even so, they've largely switched to Amazon AWS.

Most offices - let alone homes - don't have access to the facilities that you can get for a song with a VPS hosted in a good data center.

Not sure if you can set-up OSX desktop to act as a Time Machine server. You can do it with a Linux box, though. I run AFP networking on my Linux box, and could use it as a Time Machine server if I wanted. Heck, you can do this on a router with OpenWRT and an external drive.

blueroom said:

Before you spend the money on an Mac Mini Server check to see if a Synology NAS will fit your needs.

As a bonus Synology has popular forum software packages available as a plug in.

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I notice those don't have very much memory on it. Are they expandable?

BornAgainMac said:

I notice those don't have very much memory on it. Are they expandable?

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No, but on the high end Atom based units the memory's socketed. Voids the warranty though.

actually, they are expandable. They have 2 or 3 slots just like any apple laptop and you can slide a stick of ram or two in.

I've deployed numerous synology devices and I would never use it for anything besides NAS and it kinda sucks at that too

the CPU's on them are terrible, I do not recommend it for a server

maybe if you are going to leave a basic webserver on it and do nothing else. But as soon as you start multitasking on the device, it slows down hardcore.

what are you going to do, run open directory?

I own the Mini Server and having finding some really good Mountain Lion Server youtube videos, I was able to setup my DSN and SSL certificate and have a real server for my home. It is a nice product and not so bad as people talk about. It is affordable and I can run my Mac applications on it.