Hello,
I am the appointed in-house IT person for a small property management company that has 17 users; 8 are local, the rest are remote. We currently rent a Windows 2008 Server on the east coast (we are on the west coast, as are most of our remote employees).
I'm considering building our own server as a more cost-effective solution in the long run. I have built several computers from scratch, but I am admittedly not as well versed in building a server. So here is what we have currently and what we use it for.
Current Solution:
Windows 2008 R2 Server
14GB Ram
2 X Intel Xeon E5645 CPUs @ 2.40 Ghz
100GB C: Drive (for OS and programs)
200GB D: Drive (for Data)
17 Users/Employees
Most used applications: Outloof, Excel, Word, QuickBooks Enterprise 14.0, Adobe Acrobat
How's it is used:
All users connect via Remote Desktop (RDP) and use theapplications directly on the server (Office, Quickbooks, Adobe Acrobat, etc). We urge users to use their local machine when using a web browser.
Email Server: The server runs SmarterMail for our company email. Currently 17 users and about 5 aliases/forwarders.
Web Server: We host our website on the server. This is low-traffic and not mission critical. At best we may get 25 visitors to our website in a day, but average is closer to 5 per day. We do not sell anything online so it is not mission critical that the website be up 99.9999% of the time. If the website goes down for 5-10 minutes here or there, our company will keep on trucking.
If I bring a server into our office, we have a good FiOS connection that has about 80MB download and 37MB upload. We can upgrade to higher speeds if needed. So instead of all employees RDP'ing across the country, most would RDP locally in the office and the remote employees would be going only across 1-2 state lines.
Disclaimer: I know I do not know everything about servers, that is why I am here. I know enough to build my own computers with confidence, but I haven't built servers. Maybe it is better to pay someone else to keep managing and be responsible for a system than to take it in house. But if I do take this on, I'm curious how you would recommend we do it. Thanks for your time.