I'm running Snow Leopard and want to setup a server.

Question

Hello everyone!
This is the situation: I have large amounts of data I want to be able to access from afar. Some friends as well. At some point we would want to share some of that data. Dropbox or similar services are not an option since space is limited and expensive. We prefer spending some money now to paying monthly... So we thought of setting up our own server. Although I'm far from being a computer specialist I proposed myself as some sort of vanguard...
The idea would be to provide to all four of us some 5 tb for storage that should be accessible from everywhere to each one of us. (I have a small MacBook Air and would like to travel light while having access to my data at home). This "data" would mostly be small files from 500kb to 5mb, a smaller portion is about 50-100mb (mostly pdfs and scans).
Then sharing: If we set this up and get it running there would still be the question of how to share data... Suggestions?
I'm running a Mac Pro 3.1 on Snow Leopard. What are my options? What kind of software or whatever this is called will I need to setup a server? For several reasons I don't feel like upgrading to Lion and Mountain Lion, in fact I'm quite stubborn about this. This means (as far as i know) that I won't be able to use OS X Mountain Lion Server...
Hardware: Any tips? We're thinking of investing some 1000 euro.
From what I've read some OS X server would be relatively easy to setup; is there other options?
I would be thankful for a link to good guide as well!
Thanks to everyone in advance!

Answer 1

SL Server runs the Apache Server. To access a remote server you set up would have to access it via a direct IP address, like 292.128.12.144, since you can't assign a pretty name to your broadcasting server such as www.goodstuff.com.
That's incorrect. If you have a dynamically assigned IP address you're going to need a way to reference it whether it be Wide Area Bonjour else a dynamic DNS service… either way you're not referencing it via an IP address. If you have a static IP address then pointing a domain name or sub-domain to it is really simple.
The biggest issue to my mind here is the upstream speed as you mentioned. Irrespective of how much storage one can cheaply attach to their server one is going to be limited to how much of that can actually trickle out of their internet connection. Moving 5TB over SATA is painful enough let alone trying to move anywhere near that over DSL or cable internet. Sure you're not going to want to transfer that all at once but that data all came from somewhere right… and all it takes to really bottleneck things is for 2 people to want something at the same time.
Don't get me wrong as there are plenty of benefits to running your own in-house server. Deprecating via the internet access to services like Dropbox isn't really one of them though. If you're mostly on the local network to your server the sure but if not then there are better solutions.
For what it's worth I use both OS X Server (Lion) and a web host as both provide a benefit that the other can't.