Well, as the title states, this post is about conveniences of sorts. What conveniences am I talking about? The computer kind of course 🙂 Essentially, the file/web server server and power to get more specific. I may have mentioned a few times here and there about moving this to another server, or etc…and I have done it several time. Just trying to save me some money, but in the end I spend more.

Currently, as I pointed out most likely a bunch of times, this server is a VM off a pretty decent (at the time anyway) quad core AMD CPU and using VMware as a type two hypervisor (in Windows). The system runs fine, and in fact I just upgraded it in some aspects. However the main issue are two fold:

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1) Performance
This system may have been great in ~2009 and it still is in some cases. Currently its on a AMD Phenom II X4 955 with 16GB of RAM. I wish I can extended the memory more, however with 16GB its max limit – I am stuck. When I try to launch another VM, I have to be sure I have enough of resources or else the system will get really bogged down and barely respond. Worse case, I need to shutdown this site and bring it back up when done (which is why there is frequent downtime at around midnight or so).

2) Price
So what does this have to do with price? You may ask yourself, well he has the hardware and the software – so whats the issue? Those questions are valid, but I have to explain some. Right now in the North East USA, it is starting to become spring and then summer (like you knew already). The problem is AC cost and power.

The price of the computer alone, without AC is around $30-$35 a month. With AC, cause you can’t leave your electronics toasty, it goes up a bunch more. In the end it still maybe cheaper than say renting out a server from a dedicate server farm, or even a VPS though.
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The bad thing about this…if I want to save money, I need to spend money. Which bring me back to the title of this post – “The price of convenience…”. Sometime ago I was going to get myself one of those RAID systems in a box. I just didn’t like how it sat in my mind though – using a non-open sourced OS (in some cases) and low-end hardware. Granted it doesn’t take much to run a file server, but a file plus a VM server – IMHO requires a decent box, which is why this system is still running to this day.

I just need to think about this and maybe someone could offer a suggestion or two. Till then – good night and hopefully we get no more snow… 🙁