Why You Should Have a Home Server

Servers are everywhere, everything we see on the internet is hosted on a server, starting from streaming platforms and social medias to blogs and personal websites.

Since I was a little child I’ve always been fascinated by everything that had to do with electricity and wires and when I first saw a computer I fell immediately in love with it.

This led me to explore this world and thanks to a dear friend I started to learn about computer hardware and how computer components really work.

This friend of mine had two computers: a powerful gaming PC used for everyday usage and another computer near to it, which wasn’t as cool as the first one but at that time it really intrigued me. So one day I asked him why he had two computers, and he replied that that silent, black computer was a home server where he kept all of his storage inside it.

I was really fascinated about the idea of having another computer to experiment and so I decided I wanted to have mine too. So, thank to his help I found some spare components, I assembled them, flashed Ubuntu Server 16.02 and started to mess around with it.

After many days of setup and a not insignificant number of times when I had to reformat everything and start from scratch finally my Intel Core 2 Duo server was ready to rock.

Creating my own home server really helped me to understand how the Linux shell works, how computers interact in a network, what a RAID configuration is and many many other concepts that really helped me in my computer engineering academic path.

Why you should have a Home Server

Here I’m gonna give you some reasons why you should create your own personal server as a Computer Engineer:

• Learn how Linux works:

Linux can be tricky to learn at first. There are many commands and configuration that are unknown to many Windows users. As a Computer Engineer you will need to dive deeper inside how a Computer works, by starting from it’s hardware and its transistors to unveil it’s main software: the operating system. By having your own Linux Server you will be able to understand how to set up a fully functional Linux machine and you will be ready when you’ll need that in your academic path.

• Understand Networking and Network Architecture:

By creating a Linux home server, you’ll need to learn how a home network works, how two computer communicate inside a network, what protocols are used to create these connections and a lot more. Having a basic understanding of networking concepts will definitely give you an edge when you’ll need to cope with your network architecture course in University.

• Store and Access your Files from Anywhere:

By setting up a personal VPN and a Samba share you will be able to access to your personal server from everywhere in the world. This will allow you to have your personal copy of all your data wherever you are, ready to be used.

• Create your own Servers:

With your personal home server you can host your own services starting from a personal website, a MySQL database to collaborate on a University project, a Plex server to watch you favorite movies or, why not, a Minecraft Server to chill with your friends (but I doubt you’ll have time for that). This will allow you to not rely on third part services to host your servers and have total control.

• Learn Computer Hardware:

By assembling your own server you will understand how PC components are connected inside a case, giving you an edge when you’ll need to replace components inside your own other computers.

You do not need a powerful hardware to run a Linux server, I started my own journey with a Intel Core Duo, 4 GB of DDR3 RAM and 1TB of hard disk and I had much fun with it. Now, many years from then, I’ve updated my personal server with a I5-6500 Intel processor, 8 GB of DDR4 RAM, a gold tier power supply for low power consumption, a gigabit Ethernet card and two 1TB hard drives in RAID 1 for data reliability.

A really cheap starting option to create your own personal server is to use a Raspberry PI, a small single-board computer, that costs around 80$, and will give you everything you need to get the grips with everything I’ve talked about.

What you should know before building one

If I was able to convince you that a home server might be a good idea there are some things that you should know before getting started:

• Security Concerns:

A personal server is another device that can be targeted by cyber attacks. When creating a home server be sure to remove default users, use strong password, use SSH Key based authentication e do not, for any reason in the world, expose your file share directly on the internet by opening your rooter ports. If you want to access your home network from outside your house the safest way to do it is to set up a personal VPN on another device, many routers have this functionality, and expose only the VPN port on your router. By using this method you’ll have a safe and direct way to access every device in your own network from outside without worrying about safety concerns.

• Power supply protection:

When running a computer 24/7 your hardware will be prone to power supply outages and this could lead to data corruption, sudden shutdowns, and even hardware damages. To protect your precious home server you should invest in an UPS. UPS is the acronym of Uninterruptible Power Supply and it’s a device that will protect your hardware from power outages and voltage spikes by switching to energy stored in battery packs when a downtime occurs. The on-battery runtimes of most UPSs are relatively short but it will allow you to buy time and shut down your computer safely. This will allow you to save yourself from expensive hardware damages. Trust me you won’t regret spending $80 for a good UPS at the time when all your friends will have fried motherboard for dinner.

• Power Consumption:

Connecting to the previous point, having an always running PC can be a problem for your energy bill. Even though your server will almost always run on low load you should consider to invest in a high tier power supply to optimize power consumption.

• Noise:

Consider that this computer will always be running and even if you may not realize it during the day it won’t be so silent as might you think. At the start of my journey I wisely chose to place my server near to my main computer in my room so that I would not have to get in the garage every time I accidentally corrupted the main hard drive and needed to reinstall the system all over again. But I soon realized that having the sound equivalent of a airplane engine under my desk all night long wasn’t such a clever idea for my sleep, so I’ve chosen to take it back to the garage.

• Always have a backup:

I cannot stress you enough about how much having an up-to-date backup of your system is important to guarantee the safety of your data and your mental health. I can tell you from experience that losing all your family photos because you accidentally dropped your hard disk from the table isn’t exactly the situation you’d like to end up in. That’s what happened to me while I was servicing my old server hard drive: it fell from the table and all the data inside got corrupted. So you should learn from my mistake and take a periodical backup to all your data, even if you don’t have a server. You can do this in two main ways: have an external hard drive where you backup all your files periodically, or invest in a cloud storage solution, like Google Drive or Dropbox, to automatically back up your data. You can do either ways but remember that, as a Computer Engineer, you do not want a single point of failure in any of your system, let alone in your childhood photos.

I hope this article has helped you understand why you should also create your own home server. I invite you to contact me in case you have any doubts about it and are interested in this topic.