My trusty HP Microserver N36L has been ticking along nicely for years with Windows 2003 at the helm, but with support for 2003 coming to an end an alternative was needed.
Recently I have been using Amazon EC2 cloud services for all my website hosting, new customers to the service get a 12 months free teir1.micro instance with myself opting for Windows Server 2012 R2 as my OS, and I’ve taken up this offer since October last year when an extended spell of server woes left me unable to serve websites.
A caveat with the free EC2 instance is the billing process, while the instance is free you have to pay attention to what is included as part of the offer, network usage, hard drive capacities and security keys are subject to charge over certain thresholds, so be aware.
With the trail due to expire in a few months I preferred to avoid an ongoing monthly cost and bring website hosting back to my own server, but not my current server as I didn’t want a box that served the web as well as store all my personal files. The logical conclusion was to get a new server.
HP has just launched the Gen 9 series servers so the Gen 8 are being offered with hefty cash back offers, tempting but the entry level Gen 8 moved to using Intel Celeron processors, while having slightly better performance, the power consumption also increased. Combine that with the expense on upgrading the basic offering with more memory and storage the cheapest solution was to go for a second hand “Gen 7”, something I’m familiar with.
I settled on a used HP Microserver N54L, ready kitted out with 4GB EEC RAM, 2 x 2TB Seagate Barracuda drives, DVD-RW drive and an extra gigabit Ethernet port, plus I can add 2 x 1TB WD Green drives spare from an earlier upgrade. Experience from a micro EC2 instance showed that this server would not be the bottleneck for a website, that would be firmly in my internet connections court.
Going forward the plan is to mothball the N36L server running Win 2003, keeping it essentially as a NAS device and closing incoming connections from the net, with the newer N54L replacing it in everyday tasks . But until then the EC2 instance is free until October, giving me chance to experiment with the best setup before going live, virtualisation will get a look in too.