Mac-mini as local meteor server

I’ve made a meteor-app for my friend’s small business doing imports and exports.

His company is small and consists of about 15 employees.

The app is to store client profiles and histories into the database for easy logging and viewing.

He only needs it in his office and is willing to buy a mac mini 2014 for a dedicated lan server.

So here are my questions.

  1. Will the mac mini 2014 strong enough to support thousands of documents?
  2. When I launch the app on the local server, is meteor run sufficient and stable enough to keep the app runnning? If so, the app would be accessed through a browser with the server ip address. eg) xxx.xxx.x.xxx:3000

I apologize in advance for such a question. I do not develop for a living, and have never deployed a server by myself.

Mac-mini works fantastic. Get the SSD drive, and preferably 8GB of ram (or more), and you’ll be set for many dozens to a hundred users, and hundreds of thousands of records. SSD drive is key. Using ‘meteor run’ is fine, but won’t auto-restart your app if something faults.

you are overpaying for the hardware by buying an apple product.

I guess you are not going to use Mac to run meteor, but linux. First of all consider data backup and redundancy.
What happens if the hard drive fails? This is the main reason why a Mac Mini is bad, you need a raid array.

Intel NUCs are the same size, costs less and offer dual drive options, so you can install 2 SSDs in raid. Plus they have faster CPU, memory and better IO. For example Intel networking chips are the best in class, for performance and stabilit.

On september Skylake NUCs will come out, which will be good for power savings. But you could buy a broadwell NUC right now and call it a day.

Check it out

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856102097&cm_re=NUC5i5RYH--56-102-097--Product

Be generous on the ram. More RAM means longer I/O bursts, like during boot storms.

Personally I would go with a tower system. Cheaper parts, better air flow, longer life span.

If the app is really really small (you only know it), you could go with an 8-core ARM server, like Odroid-XU.