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Good morning community!

Let me explain what I am trying to do and maybe someone can point me into the right direction. Most of my experience is in the Windows server world. I am in the process of starting a small business, and for now I will be working from my home. I have also made the decision to work as an Apple shop with all Macs (Very excited about that).

My ISP is really crappy at home and having almost all ports blocked I has to look at alternatives to running in house email. So I found a company that will host a OS X server in their data center for a very reasonable price. From that machine I will run, email and web server. Does not include a lot of storage space and due to my data connection I would not want to use that for file storage or backups of my local machines. Here's were I get lost, I would also like to put a OS X Server on-site for file storage, Time Machine and other server tasks. Using Open Directory can I like these two machines.

So to sum it all up both servers and clients are on the same directory? Thanks for your input.

Jason

Jason Sommers
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  • Jason welcome to ServerFault. As asked, this type of question isn't a good fit for the site. The best thing to do is break this up into smaller, more specific questions, and also take a look at the best way to ask those questions here. In addition, I'd have to say self hosted email probably isn't necessary these days, given the vastness of cloud storage in comparison. I do wish you success with the company though. – MDMoore313 Apr 14 '15 at 12:41

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Do not host your own email. Especially on an OSX server. Period.

I know this isn't the answer you want, but it is what you need to hear. Hosting email is incredibly challenging. Doing it yourself with either end up with you spending hours a week troubleshooting and fixing or it will end up with undelivered email, both incoming and outgoing.

Instead of hosting your own, use a third party email service like Google Apps or Office365. With either of those, you can use your own domain, and the service will be many orders of magnitude more reliable than you could ever get hosting your own on a single OSX server that has very great chance of failing in any number of ways, taking down your whole infrastructure with it.

Now, as for your web services. OSX isn't really a realistic contender there, either. Just rent a small VPS from Linode, DigitalOcean, etc. and use that for web services. By doing so, you will not only expose yourself to the way in which professionals host websites, but you will also avail yourself to the veritable treasure trove online of reference materials and shared expertise on using Linux as a web server.

You're just getting started, and I appreciate the excitement and enthusiasm you're having. Start simple, though. Hosting is complicated, and there are a million ways to mess things up.

EEAA
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  • Treasure trove of tutorials? There are some gems, but most of them are complete crap. And it's very difficult for someone inexperienced to tell the difference. – Michael Hampton Apr 13 '15 at 01:19
  • I second this - it's so insanely cheap to use outside mail providers, unless you have plans to scale out and starting an email hosting business there's no point in going through this for the sake of a one or two email addresses. – Ethode Apr 13 '15 at 01:32
  • @MichaelHampton you're right. I'll change that verbiage. – EEAA Apr 13 '15 at 01:33