Remote Server for a Startup

tekton23

Hi,

Can anyone suggest a cost effective remote server that could be used for our startup business? We work in a creative industry, so have many and sometimes fairly large files to store. My business partner and I work 2-3 days a week in our office and 2-3 at home. We need to constantly share files and it would be great if whenever/wherever we open our laptops it was like using a standard office server.

I am looking for a fast, secure solution and prefereably one that keeps the same letter for the drive extension every time you login. I have found that a service like Dropbox seems to take up a lot of processing power when running in the background.

Thanks,

T23

AndyPix

The cheapest way would be to get a NAS box to sit in your office, and open a port to it on your office router.
Its speed would be limited to the speed of your office internet.

onomatopoeia99

Dropbox should't take a lot of processing power, what it can do though is saturate your internet connection while synchronising changes. If you have a lot of big files and you change several of them, it can end up spending all its time running your upload at maximum, which will potentially adversely affect everyone else using the connection.

Yes, I went through this at work when our employer was syncing all his holiday photos and videos and it absolutely killed our internet connection (ADSL in those days) as dropbox spawned several upload threads so was hogging almost all the available capacity.

tekton23

onomatopoeia99 wrote: »

Dropbox should't take a lot of processing power, what it can do though is saturate your internet connection while synchronising changes. If you have a lot of big files and you change several of them, it can end up spending all its time running your upload at maximum, which will potentially adversely affect everyone else using the connection.

Yes, I went through this at work when our employer was syncing all his holiday photos and videos and it absolutely killed our internet connection (ADSL in those days) as dropbox spawned several upload threads so was hogging almost all the available capacity.

Yes, now you mention it I think it was syncing that caused the issue. It just seemed that my laptop's fan was constantly whirring until I turned off Dropbox.

tekton23

AndyPix wrote: »

The cheapest way would be to get a NAS box to sit in your office, and open a port to it on your office router.
Its speed would be limited to the speed of your office internet.

This sounds like a good solution, the only thing is that it would be good to have the drive backing up elsewhere, or mirrored.

Not having to invest in hardware, sorting out the installation and having a third party look after its running would also be a pro. However is not essential, as the NAS drives I looked at on Amazon seem user friendly enough.

AndyPix

Using a NAS is a one-off payment, and they are fairly inexpensive.
Simplicity its-self to install
No need for someone to look after its running, once set up it will just work

jaybeetoo

Most NAS drives have the option to sync to another (remote) NAS.

Have a look at Box if you don't want to look after the hardware yourself.

tekton23

AndyPix wrote: »

Using a NAS is a one-off payment, and they are fairly inexpensive.
Simplicity its-self to install
No need for someone to look after its running, once set up it will just work

Thanks Andy - Agreed, they do look good and this might well be the option we go for. Have you any advice about backing up the NAS drive offsite, i.e. cloud service or manual periodic backups to a hard drive?

AndyPix

If it was me, i would just do periodic backups to an external hard drive, but your needs may be diffrent.
Many of the synology and WD offerings allow automatic backup to the cloud, but then you need some kind of online storage , which is why you wanted the NAS in the first place !!


Try to make sure whichever device you go for has WD RED drives inside.
They are a bit more expensive but faster and much more reliable

rtho782

You could even have a NAS in each of the three locations, each home and the office, then use something like Bittorrent Sync to sync any changes.

It has the advantage that you all have a local copy of every file, wherever you are, and double offsite backup. As long as you're not working on the same file (which could cause version issues) this would give a much better user experience.

Strider590

A nice cheap (as in potentially free) solution would be to use remote desktop to access your office PCs and basically work as though your actually there in the office.

It's just a case of setting up a port mapping in the office router, different port for different machine.

So you'd go for example port 62100 to the <IP of your machine> on port 3389.
and port 62101 to <IP of his machine> on port 3389.

Then externally you access the remote machine by connecting to the IP address of the office connection + either port 62100 or 62101.

I can't promise it'll be great for graphics/image/video work, but it's got to be worth a shot.