Does your business need a server?

People ask me this about twice a month, and about half the time they are asking a different question from the one they think they are asking.

“Do we need a server” can mean do we need a machine in the cupboard by reception. It can also mean do we need something of our own running somewhere, as opposed to paying a monthly fee to somebody whose product nearly fits. Those have opposite answers most of the time, so it is worth separating them before anybody spends money.

The box in the cupboard is usually the wrong answer now

Ten years ago a small office server did four jobs. It held the shared drive, it ran the print queue, it was the domain controller, and quite often it ran the mail.

Three of those have gone somewhere else. Mail went first and went completely. File shares went next, and whatever you think of SharePoint, it does not need cooling, it does not have a warranty that expires, and nobody has to remember to check it. The print queue is the one people cling to and it is not a reason to own a server.

What is left is the fourth job and the awkward one: a line-of-business application that will only run on Windows Server, sold by a company that has opinions about where it lives. Accounts packages, CAD licence servers, practice management systems. If that is your situation then you do need a server, and the interesting question is not whether but where, because a great many of those applications run perfectly well on a virtual machine in a datacentre and the vendor has simply never been asked.

If you already have one of these boxes and nobody is quite sure what is on it, I wrote about the first day of working that out. It is a very common position and it is not a dramatic one.

You might still need a server. Just not in the office

Here is the other question, and it is the one that has been growing.

You need something of your own, running continuously, that you control, when you have an application nobody sells. That is most of the work I do. A process that currently lives in a spreadsheet and needs logins and permissions around it has to run somewhere, and that somewhere is a server, whether or not anybody calls it one. The multi-tenant platform I built for an IT firm gives every client company its own database file, which is a design decision that only makes sense because I also run the machine it sits on.

You need one when the data cannot sit in somebody else’s product. Sometimes that is a contract, sometimes it is a customer’s security questionnaire, and increasingly it is AI. I put a private assistant on a server rather than into a subscription for exactly that reason: the useful version of that tool has your documents in it, and your documents going into a free tier is a decision somebody should make deliberately.

And you need one when something has to happen on a schedule and keep happening. Imports, exports, a nightly job that talks to a supplier’s system. These are small and dull and they are the things that quietly run a business.

None of that requires hardware in your building. It requires a virtual server, somebody’s name on it, and somebody paying attention to it.

A website on its own is not a reason

I should say this plainly because it comes up.

If what you have is a website, you do not need a server. You need hosting and somebody looking after it, which is what the care plan is, at £49 a month with the hosting inside it. Running your own box to host one brochure site is a way of turning a solved problem into a hobby.

The line moves when the site stops being a site. A booking system, a customer login, anything storing data that would be awkward to lose. At that point you are back in the previous section.

What actually decides it is who looks after it

The server is cheap. It has been cheap for years. The bill is not the thing that determines whether this is a good idea.

What determines it is whether anybody is going to look at the thing again after the week it gets set up. A server on the internet with nobody watching it is not neutral, it degrades. I went through a month of authentication logs on my own production box once and found roughly 193,000 failed password attempts, continuous and automated, against a machine that looked completely healthy and had no incident attached to it. That is the baseline. That is what a server experiences on a Tuesday.

The other half is subtler and I have written about it since: a box can be fully patched and still be running the vulnerable code, because Linux keeps running the kernel it booted until somebody reboots it. Nothing warns you. The update log looks perfect.

So the honest version of the question is not “do we need a server”, it is “are we prepared to have one”. Those come with different price tags and only one of them is on an invoice.

What it costs, and how I price it

One-off provisioning and hardening is a fixed price, quoted after a conversation about what is going on it. Ongoing cover is monthly and priced per server rather than per hour, for the same reason as always: charging by the hour pays me more when things take longer, and it makes you hesitate before ringing about something small.

I do not publish a day rate. That is deliberate and I have said why on the service page — a published rate becomes the ceiling in every negotiation afterwards.

What the monthly covers is patching, monitoring, backups that get tested by restoring them rather than by reading a status page, and being the person who picks up. What it does not cover is a team. I am one person with an alert on my phone. If an outage at four in the morning costs you money by the hour, you want a hosting provider with staff on shift, and I will tell you that on the first call rather than after you have signed something.

When I say no

Three situations, and I hit all of them this year.

If an off-the-shelf product does the job, buy the product. The fact that I could build it is not an argument that I should.

If you want a server in the office for a reason that is really about control rather than function, I will push back once. Control is a real requirement, but a virtual machine you own the credentials to gives you the same control and does not need a working air conditioning unit in August.

And if the honest answer is that nobody at your company will ever think about this machine again, and there is no budget for anybody external to, then a server is the wrong shape of solution and a subscription that somebody else patches is the right one, even if it fits worse.

If you are trying to decide

Write down what the thing actually has to do, in one paragraph, without using the word server. Then send it to me. Half the time the answer is that you need hosting and a care plan, which is cheaper and less interesting than what you were expecting, and I would rather tell you that now than after you have bought a machine.