I was around 15 when I started to play around with web and game server hosting. As a result, I became interested in owning my own dedicated server, but my 5mbps down/1mbps up connection did not make me a suitable host. After moving into an apartment where I don’t pay for electricity and has Verizon FIOS, I was able to finally build my own computer and learn how to be a sysadmin.
Hardware
Doubling my main computer as a HTPC and hosting game servers on top of that only led to everyone having an inconsistent experience due to my resources being eaten up whenever I started up a game. Near 100% CPU and RAM utilization isn’t fun for anyone. I decided to build my own (dedicated) server. This was the fun part.
Since I have only built gaming rigs in the past, server grade hardware was unexplored territory. I had to research server grade motherboards, NAS drives, ECC RAM, Intel Xeon processors, etc. This was my final build after a week of research: