In title, can elaborate if needed.
Server serves a specific application(s). PC is general day to day usage.
Both are computers. Pc hardware can be used as a server. Server hardware can be used as a pc.
Using a computer for day to day tasks - call it a pc. Use it to run a web server application or host a game - that one or more users will access - call it a server
Hardware can be configured to optimise it for its function. E.g pc can have latest GPUs and “servers” can have multicore cpus and loads of ram, rack mounting form factor and dual power supplies for redundancy.
But it could also be weak - i have raspberry pi’s and old laptops set up as a servers
Server hardware can be used as a pc.
Correction: not all server hardware can be used as a PC
For example server gpus without outputs mainly used for running calculations
Even these boxes will allow a serial connection. You can just open a tty and you can treat it just like a PC… if you’re comfortable on the command line.
If i remember correctly there is a way to make compute gpu process the image and then forward it to the onboard video to be shown.
So if we want to get pedantic. Only asics are really bound to one task, the rest is adaptable if you are willing to sacrifice enough time and mental sanity.
Thanks for the reply. This much I understand, I guess a better way to ask would be, what are the differences in “advertised”(for lack of a better word) server hardware that more effectively accomplish the task of serving?
If I were to build a server at home for media hosting, what are the areas I should focus on? I guess a good example is error correcting memory (hopefully I’m remembering that right)
Is that something that’s just going to have slightly better performance or is that crucial? And are there other examples of hardware that I should be focusing on?
Consumer grade vs business grade
You could get something that will work for a certain period of time on and off intermittent usage; that’s consumer grade.
Want something that will have power redundancy (hot swappable), ethernet redundancy, RAID storage (for redundancy and switching out bad drives), and so on… for staying powered on for 24/7/365 that would be business grade. It’s all about the uptime and reaching 5 9s or HA (high availability) .
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability#Percentage_calculation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_nines
Honestly depends on whats being served. As i say people can run servers on enterprise grade multi thousand £ systems or a £50 pi or mini pc.
Since you have a specific usage in mind, media server, you basically want hardware that will allow optimised performance so you can have a lag/ buffer free experience.
Say,
hardware thats good for on the fly encoding/ decoding
Lots of ram for multitasking.
Lots of storage to store the media.
Maybe gigabit network cards for multiuser streaming without bandwidth bottlenecks.
It really depends on the experience and chokepoints
ECC ram ill let someone more familiar answer but im leaning towards non critical and nice to have
Nothing you couldnt upgrade on your typical PC. Just makes life easier…at a cost.
Power efficiency will also matter for a home server to some extent. You don’t want a 300 watt idle power draw 24/7 just to handle streaming a video for yourself once a day.
Most home devices won’t use that at idle, but older PC’s, or larger setups could.
ECC is a ‘good to have’, but isn’t critical unless your systems are.
Most of the higher costs that come with stuff advertised as “server hardware” come from the need to get 99.99% uptime instead of 99.9%, because that 0.09% represents millions of dollars, or even people’s safety. If you just want to store personal data and run some basic services like a media server or a personal email, then pretty much any hardware will work, just make sure to backup your data regularly in case something goes wrong with your disks.
If I understand correctly your asking about hardware sold as for “servers”. “Server” hardware features focus on scalability and redundancy. If you’re running a service that’s generating income and the powers that be therefore say it “can’t” go down then you’re starting to pay for redundant systems. Multiple hotswapable power supplies for example.
Most folks self hosting don’t really need to worry about this level of availability as they’re hosting services as a hobby or for friends at most; not paying customers with a boss demanding high availability.
For a home server, go get a Thinkcentre tiny m710q for 80€.
Cheap, uses very low power, easy to upgrade and maintain (one nvme, one 2"5 slot, two DDR4 SODIMM 32GB max but people say it’s actually 64GB, lots of usb & video ports).
For a business, where the server/PC will run at full speed, generate heat, and eventually break down, you need beefier hardware and redundance.
You all need a backup plan of course but if you lose your home PC it’s not the same thing than losing your business…
It’s not really the hardware, it’s what you do with it. Encode lots of stuff? Don’t buy that thinkcentre for example.
This is the way to go. I got one second hand for $70. It already had the 16gb ram upgrade. The 7th gen Intel processor handles Jellyfin encoding without a problem even though it’s an old i3. Gigabit ethernet, WiFi, NMVe slot, and sips power.
Features you’ll find in the machines you’ll get if you order from the “Server” section of Dell’s website:
- A chassis that fits in a 19 inch rack
- Loud, high volume cooling fans and otherwise cooling systems intended to allow the machine to run every component in the box at full power continuously for years on end.
- Often, multiple network adapters both for redundancy in case of failure and possibly for increased bandwidth.
- Xeon or Epic CPUs with truly large core counts
- Large amount of PCIe or other expansion, possibly used for the aforementioned multiple network adapters, ASICs, GPUs for rendering or CUDA type workloads (or increasingly the manufacture of AI slop), etc.
- Drive bays for DAYS if it’s to be used for storage intensive workloads or as a file server.
- Redundant power supplies. As in, most “servers” have two power cables so you can plug them into separate UPSes.
The thing is, what really makes it a “server” is the software it runs, and nearly every computer I own is nine kinds of “server”. Take for example my Wi-Fi router, it has a little web server running on board, it hosts a web page I can get to by keying its IP address into a web browser from inside my network to get to its settings. It also runs my LAN’s DHCP server. New devices get hooked up to my network and assigned an IP address nine or ten times a year when I decide to play with a Raspberry Pi or ESP32 or something, so it doesn’t have a lot to do, but it is providing a service therefore it is a “server.”
You want to build “a server at home for media hosting.” I’ve got my movies and such stored on a lower end 2-bay Synology NAS, which is a little box about the size of a toaster that sits on the shelf next to my Wi-Fi router/switch thing. It’s got two 3.5" hard disks in it, a little ARM processor, it runs Linux, it can do a lot of things, just, not everything all at once because it’ll beat the poor thing’s tiny little brain out. They make NASes with beefier x86 CPUs that can do things like run transcoding operations for Plex and shit…I just hose mp4s across my LAN.
A home media server is probably going to sit around most of the day doing basically nothing, then maybe do a bit of work in the evenings when you want to watch a movie or something, and then do basically nothing all night while you’re asleep. Consumer grade PC hardware is very much up to the task for that.
I’m very torn, because people here are correctly going “nothing”, but then launching on long descriptions of what’s convenient for a server to have. I can’t tell if that is answering your question or if the correct answer is just “a server is any computer that hosts a service for some other computer to access over a network”. Both?
Hell, technically a server doesn’t even need to be a PC at all. You can absolutely have a server and a client be just pieces of software hosted in the same physical machine. “Server” and “client” are just words for what thing is asking for the data and what thing is sending the data over.
Anything can be a server really, including your toaster: https://laughingsquid.com/netbsd-toaster/
But typically, servers are built with more performant and reliable hardware in mind. The kinds of servers your PC or phone talk to when checking your email or watching a video are rack mounted and basically look like a pizza box
And a rack can have dozens of these stack on top of one another, and a data center can have hundreds or thousands of racks.
But nothing is stopping you from treating your home PC as a server. The software is the same since the same kinds of chips are in both your PC and the rackmount servers (generally). Running Linux on your desktop/laptop can allow you to do normal computer stuff, AND also share files, host a personal blog, share a printer, run a bittorrent tracker, or a tor relay, or even your own email. Some of this is even possible in Windows versions that aren’t “Server”.
Your picture shows a blade. A blade is a server…
Pretty much software. Servers predominately run services that other computers use (web server, file server, etc). PCs may run some of those things as well, which blurs the line, but the software they run is meant for direct usage by the end user (word processing, browser, media player).
Hardware wise, at the high end, the hardware is definitely different, but there is a lot of cross over at the mid and low end. The self-hosting community use a lot of consumer grade PCs as their server hardware.
Gonna copy/paste my other comment because it applies here too, especially the thank you part.
Thanks for the reply. This much I understand, I guess a better way to ask would be, what are the differences in “advertised”(for lack of a better word) server hardware that more effectively accomplish the task of serving?
If I were to build a server at home for media hosting, what are the areas I should focus on? I guess a good example is error correcting memory (hopefully I’m remembering that right)
Is that something that’s just going to have slightly better performance or is that crucial? And are there other examples of hardware that I should be focusing on?
I’ve used parts from my old PC for my Homeserver. Among other things, it runs Jellyfin. Most of my library can be directly played by most clients, so I need almost no transcoding. Just serving the media uses tiny amounts of ram and compute, and the only bottleneck I could see is a residential Internet connection (I’ve got symmetrical gigabit, but there’s lots of residential gigabit that limits uploads to like 50mpbs).
For media hosting, you can go an incredibly long way without needing to dip into “server grade” hardware.
An old desktop with a GPU and plenty of storage will be just fine, especially if you are only serving a few clients.
ECC isnt really that important, you’ll likely never notice if you get a memory error.
The one major advantage desktop PC hardware has is power usage and noise. They are generally quiet and reasonably power efficient, which matters a lot.
My advice would be to start small on an old desktop, and then upgrade when you actually hit a limitation of your current hardware.
Yes, ECC memory. If used, then CPU also needs to be able to support it. Then there’s number of cores, unless you specifically need high single-core performance. Efficient and reliable PSU, low power-consumption, lots of memory, redundancy for storage. Stuff like that.
None of which are essential, BTW. Any working PC can be made into a server regardless of its hardware.
All server really is is just another PC that’s been built with a different purpose in mind. The rest is software configuration. They need to be reliable, scalable, and cost you as little as possible to upkeep.
Even your router is the same. It’s all computers.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned so far i think: enterprise server hardware often has some form of remote management built in. This allows you to remotely start/stop your server, access the console, or even set up another OS without having to physically go to the server. You can add similar features to consumer-grade hardware, but they aren’t as advanced.
On a server, you usually don’t use a graphical user interface (GUI), so you just don’t install it. On the other hand, apart from the software that actually does the serving (fileserver need different software than mailservers or webservers), you’ll probably install a remote administration service.
Define “server”…
Every PC can be a server, it used to be common with earlier online gaming and VoIP apps like teamspeak to have someone using their PC as the server. Nowadays, with the cloud and light device like Chromebooks it feels like back in the 80’s where there was a couple of server, and people would use cheap low tech terminal to display the console where they work from while all the computing power was located on the servers.
Define “server”…
OP specifically asked exactly for this.
“Server” is a really terrible word. There’s server software, which is often referred to as just “server”. And then there’s hardware, which happens to run server software, so it also gets referred to as “server”. There’s also hardware that’s specifically built for the purpose of running server software, so even if it does not currently do so, folks would likely still refer to it as “server”.
But yeah, in principle you can run server software on your desktop PC or even your phone, and then someone might refer to that hardware as “server”.
So long as it serves something on a networking port, you can technically call it a “server”.Does this media server need to be accessible when you are away from home? Will you store personal data on it?
Out of band management: this is a server feature that lets you access and manage the server even if the OS is down. That’s important if you may be away from home and need to fix a boot problem.
You can simulate some of this with PiKVM (remote console access) and PDU solutions (remote power control).
Redundant power: servers often have redundant power supplies, so that if one fails it can still function.
You can simulate this, with short downtime, by having a replacement ready. Mini PCs make this easy by using relatively inexpensive laptop style external power bricks. But also think about the power circuit - is the server on the same breaker/fuse with something that could potentially take the circuit down while you are away?
ECC RAM: this is about data integrity. If there is a failure in non-ECC then a bit flip could cause data corruption.
You can’t really get this without ECC. Using a file system that has anti-corruption features can help reduce some of the risk. You probably trust your data to consumer PC hardware, so this would be no different really. It’s about risk mitigation.
And that’s the main thing here, deciding on the use cases and prioritizing/budgeting how you mitigate risks to each.
A dedicated server might not need any kind of graphical output hardware (you would remote connect to it to do anything on the software side), but it’s kind of essential for PC use.
I’d say the operational requirements.
A home PC mostly has max 1 simultaneous user (i.e. the “person”) - out of maybe a small pool of potential users - the availability requirement is ad-hoc. It offers many services, some available immediately on boot, but many are on call.
A server typically has capacity to provide services to many simutaneous users and probably has a defined availability requirement. Depending on the service, and the number of users and the availability and performance requirements it may need more communication bandwidth , more storage, faster storage, more cores, UPS, live backups and so on. But it doesn’t strictly need any of that hardware unless it helps meet the requirements.
In terms of software any modern PC runs an OS offering a tonne of services straight from boot / login. I don’t see any real differences there. Typically a server might have more always on serices and less on-call services, but these days there’s VMs and stuff on both servers and on PCs.
Most PC users would expect to have more rights such as to install and execute what they want. A server will typically have a stronger distinction between user and sys-admin. but again if a server offers a VMs it’s not so clear cut. That mostly comes out of the availability requirement - preventing users compromising the service.
