Yellerdog

I have been running my own Domino server out of my home since about 2001. We run our family e-mail and web sites from it.

I started with an old HP Pavilion back in 2001. In 2003 I upgraded to Windows 2000 and moved to a new box with a gig of RAM and a huge, for the time, 20Gb hard drive. This server is still up and running today. It's gone from Domino R6 through 6 and 7, and currently runs 8.0.1. In, I think,. 2005, I added a second hard drive (30Gb). The transaction logs go on C: and the Domino data goes on D. I also upped the memory to 2 GB. But other than that, service packs, and a new LAN card, it hasn't changed much in years.

The neat thing about this server, aside from its longevity, is that through all the version permutations and my experiments with Tomcat, DB2, and other products, it has always met my needs. Windows 2000 has, overall, been a great OS for me. I'm planning to finally retire this server this summer, and will (reluctanlty) probably move to Windows Server 2003. I'm sticking with Windows primarily because I know it, it works on my hardware, and I own the licenses so it's free. If I knew Linux I would consider it, but since I don't know it I can't be bothered to learn it unless there's a good financial reason to do so.

So this Windows 2000, 2 Gb RAM, 2-disk server has pretty much been an ideal solution for me, perfectly balancing out cost and performance while being extremely low-maintenance. If you could picture the perfect server for an SMB organization, what would it be? And remember I don't mean "the most powerful server"-- imagine you are paying for all the costs out of your own pocket, so you'll need to balance cost, performance, maintenance, utility, and longevity.