This is GetMorePC podcast number three. I wanted to talk about a server. What is a server and do you need one?
A lot of people think, “Well I don’t need a server. What do I need a server for? Why do I need a computer that nobody is going to work on in my company? This is just an extra expense.” I’ll tell you right now, you need a server if you’ve got four or five computers on the network. Once you start getting to that point things can get a little hairy from a network point of view.
If you’ve got two or three computers on your network: no, you probably don’t need a server. Your router is basically acting as your server. You probably don’t have too many users and everybody has their own computer and they can log right in and work happily on their computer.
Once you start getting four or five computers, you may have a need to share data inside of your organization. You may have some files that you keep using over and over again that would be convenient to have in a central place. You may want to start backing up every one of those workstations all in one place as opposed to having to back up five different workstations, which you should be doing.
One of the reasons people put a server in is they want to have a central repository, a place to work from for all of their workstations. You may end up having some users at that point, some different employees in your company that need to have access to certain files and maybe not have access to other files. That can be really hard to do with just a bunch of computers. If you build a server, essentially you’re establishing a real business network. This is something we’ve done a lot of times and we recommend it if you get above 4 or 5 computers.
It can also be a place where you centrally manage all the computers on your network. You have your users, but you also have the computers themselves that you can check in and see: are they getting their updates, are they all hitting on all cylinders, are all of the computers get their patches and Windows updates? You can check these things from one place.
There are different antivirus tools you can have that you can use from the server that allows you to scan the whole network in one place, have a centralized quarantine repository. you should probably have a server if you want to have some sort of scalable business computer network.
Now if you’re just trying to keep it small, that’s fine you can keep it small. If you want to grow your company, you need to have a system in place that is scalable and a server is scalable. You get it in about five users, you can use up to about 25 users. You take it on out from there. You can scale it with your company. Fortune 500’s are using servers. They’re supporting all their thousands of employees.
You gotta start somewhere and you need to start thinking in terms of how can we reproduce some of our business processes?How can we centralize and automate some of our business processes? A server is a really great way to do that. If you have any questions be sure to leave them down in the comments below. We’ll be glad to answer any questions you have about a server.
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