As with all technical things, measure twice, cut once. But how much time to spend measuring depends in large part on how complicated your environment is. There are a lot of factors that go into planning a server appropriately, such as heating and cooling, the physical machine that will be the server, and even how the server will be backed up.

You can spend an unlimited amount of money on a server. Or you can spend next to nothing and buy a used Mac mini on eBay. The scale of your purchase and the complexity of the deployment are two very independent concepts though. In this chapter, we’re going to look at, well, basically what you should buy before you get started installing that spiffy server of yours (and, importantly, whether you should buy something different than the shiny box you already have in your hands).