We think we want to buy a server for our office, but have no idea how to go about it.<p>We&#x27;re an AWS team, we&#x27;ve never had a physical server before. We&#x27;ve got a scalable setup on AWS with 10 or so different types of machine (&quot;layers&quot;) that make up our pipeline.<p>In the office, we all use Mac Minis running Ubuntu or laptops running OSX.<p>During development, we run a set of VMs on each of our local machines that gives us a scaled-down copy of the real system, and we feed very little data through it, so it can handle it.<p>Recently we&#x27;ve been adding layers to the system, though, and it&#x27;s getting pretty out of hand. Whilst we can still run the VMs, even with tiny amounts of data flowing through it, it absolutely <i>crawls</i>.<p>We&#x27;ve tried testing remotely on a clone of the live setup, but the save-code-to-seeing-results latency&#x27;s a killer.<p>We&#x27;re thinking the solution is to get a nice big server with a few hundred gigs of RAM and a dozen processors or so, pop it in our office and offload the VMs onto that. Then we can share a disk with it over a hard wire, the latency will be nothing and it&#x27;ll run like a dream.<p>The problem is, we know how to think about servers in the AWS sense (like (this)[http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ec2instances.info&#x2F;?cost=monthly]) but there doesn&#x27;t seem to be anyone selling servers like that, there are all these fragmented deals that say things like &quot;up to 512Gb RAM&quot; and talk about the types of processor, rather than their specs, and when you do find a good catalogue, it doesn&#x27;t have any prices on it!<p>Does anyone know how we can find a server that suits our needs at a decent price? Has anyone done it before? Is there a whole world here that we simply don&#x27;t understand?<p>Thanks!
Toby
Ask HN: How to buy an office server?