Gizmodo has an interesting set of pictures, apparently of a book from microsoft titled “Mommy, why is there a server in the house – Helping your child understand the stay-at-home server” They are a hilarious read
While I have a server at my house, and one at my parent’s house, and several friends that have their own “server”, I doubt that many families are looking at buying a serve. (When I say server, I mean a desktop that is on all the time, of course mine run linux).
The only problem with this idea is that it is rather environmentally unfriendly. Having a server on all the time is not good for the environment, however in my case I am using my two servers for 100G+ of data (mostly photos), so the cost of an online storage is too expensive.
For a lot of purposes, online storage is better and cheaper. Apple have .mac that achieves this.
The other big drawback is if you want data from outside your house, your upload ADSL speed is likely to be shocking!
It will be interesting to see how many people start using home servers, particularly Vista Home ones given the file corruption problems reported for it
Whilst leaving a server on is environmentally unfriendly, if you use something like a Linksys NSLU2 (a Slug to its friends) will only use about 5 watts. If it’s only under a light load it’s brilliant – I’m really pleased with mine.
That is a good point!
I should really be thinking about replacing my server with something lower power, perhaps a SLUG, maybe just a mini ITX system (which also consume less power, 15-20W under full load)