Hi. Some friends of mine are starting a business and they want to setup a server to host a simple “contact” website, run an e-mail service (about 10 accounts for now but with possibilities of expanding it to support more) and to store and remote access documents.

Im a computer savvy person so they asked me for help, but dont know much about self-hosting so I come here asking you:

What kind of hardware do they need and would be best? What OS and other software is required and recomended?
How to set it up/configure it? Im partial to foss but if there are good propietary options they are acceptable too. And last: What do we have to watch out for or avoid.

Also, space is a bit of an issue, I was thinking they could use something small like an intel nuc but Im worried that hardware would be underpowered for their needs.

I have been googling for stuff myself but I get overwhelmed by the ammount of information and some contradicting opinions so I appreciate your recomendations and guidance. Im not asking you to give me a full tutorial, although I would appreciate it too, but just to be pointed in the right direction to avoid, as much as possible, spending money and time on things they might not really need or might not perform as well.

Thanks in advance.

  • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
    38·
    16 hours ago

    So don’t take this as rude, but if none of you have experience running email for a business, you’re probably better off contracting that part out.

    It’s a lot of work to get working, keep working, and is prone to exploding for no particular reason so if this is a business-critical component, it’s worth the $20 a month to get it hosted where making your email actually deliver to people’s inbox is someone else’s problem.

    Same for the business website: if it being down is going to cost money, a simple static page like that is hostable for literally free with cloudflare or netlify or any of a couple of other providers, and that’s probably what I’d do. (And, frankly, is what I do with a lot of stuff I host.)

    As for storing and accessing remote documents, if you pay for gsuite or office365, you’ll get that included in the price, so like uh, that might be the best way to go.

    I know this is literally not what you asked, but…

    • David From Space@orbiting.observerEnglish
      6·
      12 hours ago

      It sucks, but as someone who hosts their own services and supports business clients: If they have a budget, Office365 all the way. Does it suck paying money to M$? Oh hell yeah. But it’s a ‘cost of doing business’. Don’t screw around if they can afford it, just go O365 :(

      • Handles
        English
        4·
        8 hours ago

        I understand the ease from an admin POV, but besides locking users into a third party, corporate suite, everything UX about Office365 sucks balls.

    • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
      8·
      16 hours ago

      Agreed. For businesses, spend the couple bucks to have Microsoft or whoever put their huge resources behind keeping you online. It’s a lot better than having the server with all your services go down when you’re expecting an important email.