Server motherboard Vs pc ?

[exxos]

In a year or 2 when I get fibre internet, I'll likely have the bandwidth to host my own server hardware. Not saying I will, but it's a consideration on long term cost saving, aside from the initial outlay costs.

It would have to be no more than 100watts full load, then it would equal what I'm paying now. The savings would be on storage space and maybe more CPU cores and ram.

But for a small server , are server motherboards any better than just normal pc motherboards? What's the difference?

Are there any boards which can be better than 4 CPU cores and 4GB ram without going over 100watt max at full load ? What's likely to be good long term on a budget ?

[olivier.jan]

Hi,
For a « Small server », I don’t think you have any advantage going for a server board. If you go for a server, you will have better cooling, easier part replacement, usually better redundancy (PSU, hot-swap disks, error correction for memory) and some more management options, but overall it will be overpriced and I doubt it fits within your 100W at full load.

I don’t know how much hits you get and the average load of your current server, but I’m not sure you need a very powerful machine. I think spending money on the storage is the most important part.
Getting some storage with proper RAID will avoid a lot of headaches, if you’ve got spare disks to replace failing ones quickly.

At the end of the day a mid-range Synology should do the job, make sure to get at least 4 drives to have a proper RAID 5 and you should be good to go. If you really want to decouple storage and processing, you can also host the web server on a Raspberry PI 5 with enough RAM (4GB min). This should all fit within your 100W target.

[stephen_usher]

I agree. It's very difficult to get down below 100W these days. Just a load of RAID disks on their own would take that.

Servers are definitely constantly power hungry, with noisy fans because they're designed for high load 24x7. They're also designed for robustness rather than total speed, so no overclocking etc. or iffy timing to cram the last FPS out of a game at the expense of reliability.

As Olivier says, a Pi 5 would make a decent server, booting from M2, logging to a spinning USB drive (as serial writing of logs will kill an SSD more quickly) and the data on a RAID NAS box mounted as an NFS volume. You may want to put the database on a second Pi5 with local storage, dumping the database nightly to the NAS box with a rotating back-up, maybe with monthly snapshots.

For security you could make the web front end Pi access the NFS server as read-only.

[Maximilian]

On the other side, servers are often dumped at reasonable prices, and you often get a suitable raid controller with those, often with the FBWC module included.(Much better that the non battery backed up soft raid crap that those cheap NAS machines use.(But they are king in the minimal energy usage department, just make lots of backups, on an external non raid disk)
You can just bring it down to one CPU and the accompanying fans and you are done, two PSU's for redundancy...
These can sometimes get these as a tower too, but not often, these are mostly 1U pizza boxes..

These days the cooling isn't that important anymore.

Keep in mind that these machines are quite loud...

[rubber_jonnie]

From a personal perspective I wouldn't self host again, it's fun to begin with, but it soon loses it's shine as the only person to support it is you and if you have limited time that's a bad thing.

Any PC can be a server, but server motherboards are often designed to support more I/O, more RAM, server class CPUs and can also include lights out capability and other redundant features such as dual PSU's and hot swap capabilities.

These days, IMHO, you're less likely to find server mainboards for sale alongside desktop boards, because to use features like I mentioned above, you also often need bespoke cases that are server specific and server mainboards for these just don't fit standard cases.

These are often rack mounted servers and they are noisy and generate quite a bit of heat, so far from ideal to have in your home.

There are micro servers and tower servers available that mitigate some of the heat and noise problems, but then you start to limit things like how much RAM can be fitted and you'll probably then need some sort of NAS or SAN for storage because the cases limit the number of disks you can install.

Saying that some of the desktop boards these days can deliver a lot of bang per buck, you only have to look at some of the gaming rigs, but they are quite a specific workload that may not work well in a server context.

Of course self hosting means you're also paying to power these machines, and it can get quite expensive and it's something that's a little difficult to pick out of your utility bill.

Just my 2 cents having done the self hosting thing with 4 servers at home, 3 of which were rack mount and all of which were power hungry space heaters!!!

[exxos]

Yeah, its would just turn into another huge time sync no doubt. Its bad enough maintaining the software side of things without adding the hardware into the mix as well. So think I will pass on the idea.