If you own a company with dozens of computers, having a dedicated server is extremely important and do it cheap is even better. Many companies invest a lot in server platforms prefabricated and already functioning in all, even with the operating system Linux, which is free and open source by its nature. In this article I want to explain how I created my first home server with dozens of simultaneous connections and with a machine that I had to throw medium-low; an old pentium4 2.4 Mhz with just 512 MB of RAM. First I installed the operating system, a Slackware without a GUI (and therefore without X and KDE). The DHCP server did it do to a router, the DNS BIND to configure the server was using the secure shell SSH for remote administration Webmin, which is a tool that allows you to administer the server on a machine via a web interface . I chose Apache as HTTP server and MySQL as a database, as manager of the Postfix mail. The router was configured to only open certain ports, port 80 for HTTP, those of the post, the database and another for Webmin. As a tool to transform the dynamic to static ip DynDNS, you can configure directly in many routers, obviously I had a third-level domain, but for what I needed! In practice using PHP pages I created some form to manage data warehouse and worked there a dozen companies, then I decided to stop giving the service on my server because it had to be always access and this was too annoying.
All this story about how I created a server with very few, indeed zero, expenses to show you that if you have a dozen locations in the company is useless to invest on big server that cost a lot and are definitely under-exploited. Let’s say that companies below 10 workstations that are to be connected to a server just an old Pentium 4 with 1GB of RAM, between 10 and 100 positions is best to move to a new computer standardized (from 300 euro because without monitor ) for networks of more than 100 workstations recommend a good computer with 4-8 GB of RAM and a quad core, a short on spending about 700 dollars. Besides the hardware need a good specialist who configure your system in 5-10 hours (500-600 dollars) and you have a great server costs much less than any other server pre-assembled or needs an operating system and applications payment.
If you do not have the time and desire to creating your own server, there are companies on the web that allow you to use your own VPS, which are nothing more than virtual servers and their own dedicated servers. The costs of such a service are quite high, but not everyone needs to have their own server with an external hosting and maybe managed.