tech-company, serversSo I plan on starting up a sole proprietorship for freelance web design, programming, and some contract IT work. Nothing big, mostly for fun. Fun being the key factor. I’m not in this for a primary source of income, nor am I expecting it to yield high pay. Just for my experience and also leverage when applying for colleges and jobs. In addition, I’m 17 so I have little to no means of startup cash.
So to my question… I am going to host everything locally. Website/Email/ the works. Do you think at this point I would need a server? Or do you think I could get away with a pretty good desktop? I need to buy something and I don’t have the funds to get a beefy server.
Thanks for any help you may be able to give me!
EDIT: I am more of a hardware/software guy. Networks aren’t my forté. I plan on marketing to very small business/residential for that reason. I have little knowledge on the impact of network connections on a computer.
It depends on what kind of work that you will be doing, but these days most people don’t buy servers any more. It is much more cost effective to rent one from Amazon or Google than to buy your own. If you are writing a web site for someone, you certainly want to host that in the cloud rather than on your own server.
The only instance I can think of where you would need to buy a server would be where you are dealing with highly confidential data and the person hiring you does not want that data in the cloud (even if encrypted).
If I were you, I would purchase a mac laptop. It is a great development machine. It might even be tax deductible. :)
It highly depends on your internet speed.
If you have a 1Gbps connection you’re good to go. Even at the 100mbps you’d be fine. But I don’t recommend it if you have a 10mbps connection.
Go to an online speed test website and check your speed. Take the upload speed and divide it by the size of the webpage you’re serving up. If the number isn’t bigger then the users hitting your site in peak times than you’re good to go.
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