Solved Thought from switching OS Windows to Linux

I use an old pc, with only 2 gigs of RAM, and a 3GHz dual core processor. Things like your graphics card and sound card don't really matter. You do need a way to connect a monitor though. I f.e. run an apache, MySQL, teamspeak and minecraft server, but those are only for testing/friends, so I won't say my server can handle 20+ people without problems, but it's not needed actually (but that depends on your needs ofcourse).

Cooling is an important issue, it's not like you need fancy water cooling but I did melt one fan, making my server overheat, that's something you don't want but I just use a regular fan, and it has runned for over two years now, so as long as you have a cooler fan, you don't really have to worry, but again, that's from my point of view, if you're planning on hosting a 100+ server, a dedicated box is the way to go, not only a normal computer can't handle that many stuff, also your internet has to be a bit better than the default house-garden-kitchen connection (do you guys have that expression in English? in Dutch is sounds great, but now that I typed it here, it seems a bit odd.. )

good luck
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Of course it depends on what you're going to do with that server. Do you want to use dozens of plugins and host it for 10, 20, 50, 100 online Players? Are you going to host aditional services (eG Mediastreaming for yourself at home) or will it be dedicated for mc?

I use my little Zbox ID81 as fileserver (ftp and samba, sharing an usb-raid), stremingserver for music, mc-server (only for a handful of friends) and some other stuff. I never experienced limitations by cpu or ram (and it's only a celeron 857 dualcore!). When we're playing on different regions/worlds, and about 4 Players, cpu-usage (java) goes up, but never reached 50% yet.

AND: my Box consumes about 15W when idle, and doesn't need to run any fans, as there's only a very little thermal waste. With an i3 or even i5 you would have way more cpu-power (more players, plugins etc. ... don't forget calculating ram!), but of course also way more eaten power, heat etc.!

If you don't want to use it for your own testing and learning, and don't want to host more "homeservices", you'll soon have to decide if an external host won't be cheaper!

AND we didn't talk about waring out your hardware! Harddisks, even cpu, ram, mainboard, psu - if you don't use expensive serverhardware, it'll go down over time, producing aditional costs! Hosts or even rent rootservers have guaranties for that