The Covid 19 Pandemic has dramatically changed our society. The most pronounced change in the workplace is the enormous increase in working remotely or from home. In 2021, 26.7% of U.S. employees worked remotely, and the trend is forming where many companies will offer flexible work arrangements which follow the “hybrid” model – where work is split between onsite at the office and remotely.
At home servers might be a worthwhile investment if you are one of these newly-minted remote workers. In this blog post, we’ll highlight some of the reasons why.
Advantages of Having a Home Server for Remote Work
By no means an exhaustive list, here are some key advantages to investing in a home server for remote work or a small business that you run from home:
- Servers are Made for Backups. Yes, there are those compact USB backup drives. While they are discrete and generally simple to use, they have to be tethered to the device you are backing up (not the best if it is a laptop or other mobile device), and they have no redundancy. If that drive fails, that data is gone. Servers are designed to house multiple hard drives with RAID capability. You can read more about RAID in our blog post here, but the main takeaway is servers with an adequate RAID controller allow you to have redundancy in your backups and “hot swap” capability. That is the feature where a failed drive can be removed from the machine and replaced with a new drive without the virtual disk being compromised or impacted.
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A Better Backup Solution than Cloud Providers. While Cloud storage has been all the rage, there are significant caveats to keep in mind:
- You are subject to their whims and change in service. OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud, and Dropbox (to name a few) all control the platform. If they change the terms of service or sync features, you have no choice but to accept. With a home server for backups, you control terms.
- Backups over the internet, especially for large files, can take time. A home server is on your local network and doesn’t need to travel over the internet. This can be a big deal if you work with large media files, which can take a long time to download (and upload) over the internet. The bottom line, a home server gives you quicker Access to Data vs. The Cloud.
- A Home Server Can Be an Opportunity for Savings. When we hear “server,” we think of a costly piece of budget-busting hardware. While, no doubt, Enterprise IT equipment can be expensive, if you find the right specs for your use case, it’s not as expensive as you think. Furthermore, with its advantages, the refurbished route is an economical way to go without sacrificing quality.
- We’re Emphasizing Backups, but a Home Server Can Have Countless Uses. For example, your server’s primary function can be for your work or small business backups, but nothing is stopping you from creating a VM and using that server as a Plex Media Server, a Minecraft Server, or just a HomeLab that you can use for experimentation and expanding your tech knowledge.
Final Thoughts
If you are working from home – either fully or hybrid – a home server could be the perfect backup solution. When you consider the advantages of a refurbished server, why not reach out to one of our reps at info@techmikeny.com? They will happily walk you through the process and suggest the best specs for your particular use case.
2 comments
Thanks for your comment below, Paul. We couldn’t agree more on reading up on the pros and cons of having your own home server/homelab. (P.S., see our blog post which covers this in some detail, “Advantages, and Some Considerations, for Using a Home Server.”). As for your T710, I don’t think we could help as 11th Gen Dells are pretty much out of the secondary market now. That said, you would be able to use that RAM in a 12th Gen server if you’re looking to reuse some of the parts. Thanks for inquiring nonetheless!
I couldn’t agree more with having a home server for WFH whether it’s a full-time WFH or hybrid. If you’re in the Tech industry (which I would be most of us are if we are reading this blog) then you definitely should look at the pro’s and con’s of such a setup.
Question for TechMike – I have an aging Dell T710, does your company offer trade-in’s for ‘newish’ gear?