Hi. Some friends of mine are starting a business and they want to setup a server to host a simple “contact” website, run an e-mail service (about 10 accounts for now but with possibilities of expanding it to support more) and to store and remote access documents.

Im a computer savvy person so they asked me for help, but dont know much about self-hosting so I come here asking you:

What kind of hardware do they need and would be best? What OS and other software is required and recomended?
How to set it up/configure it? Im partial to foss but if there are good propietary options they are acceptable too. And last: What do we have to watch out for or avoid.

Also, space is a bit of an issue, I was thinking they could use something small like an intel nuc but Im worried that hardware would be underpowered for their needs.

I have been googling for stuff myself but I get overwhelmed by the ammount of information and some contradicting opinions so I appreciate your recomendations and guidance. Im not asking you to give me a full tutorial, although I would appreciate it too, but just to be pointed in the right direction to avoid, as much as possible, spending money and time on things they might not really need or might not perform as well.

Thanks in advance.

    • IsoKieroEnglish
      5·
      2 months ago

      It depends. I’ve ran small websites and other services on a old laptop at home. It can be done. But you need to realize the risks that come with it. If the thing I’m running for fun goes down. someone might be slightly annoyed that the thing isn’t accessible all the time, but it doesn’t harm anyones business. And if someones livelihood is depending on the thing then the stakes are a lot higher and you need to take suitable precautions.

      You could of course offload the whole hardware side to amazon/hetzner/microsoft/whoever and run your services on leased hardware which simplifies things a lot, but you still run into a problem where you need to meet more or less arbitary specs for an email server so that Microsoft or Google even accept what you’re sending, you need to have monitoring and staff available to keep things running all the time, plan for backups and other disaster recovery and so on. So it’s “a bit” more than just ‘apt install dovecot postfix apache2’ on a Debian box.