Server Setup Remote & Onsite

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  • rodzilla

    Looking for ideas on server setup for the agency I work for. We have some full-time remote people and a mix of people who work on-site and from home throughout the week. The server situation offsite (logging in through VPN) blows - super slow and connectivity is spot from time to time.

    What are some of your experiences and/or maybe hopefully some ideas on what works well for this type of setup?

  • Gnash0

    dropbox business may work for you. https://www.dropbox.com/business…

    I used it at a company I was rebranding where all the key players were all over the place. It was a fairly easy sell to the bean-counters because it involved no capital purchases and was easily scalable.

    We initially used the adobe cloud drive (since they already had adobe team accounts) but it was super annoying for a various reason. Dropbox was a no brainer in comparison.

    • they also already had a VPN but it sucked ass, as wellGnash
    • +1

      I use the personal account between 2 employees and 2 machines and it works a charm; thought of the business account but only makes sense with 3+ employees.
      ideaist
    • ^ true. look into the Individual Pro account which includes Smart Sync (which is an awesome feature)Gnash
    • We smart sync'd the shared assets (photo library, brand elements, etc) so they didn't need to live on peoples laptops.Gnash
    • We have about 20 employees - two full-time dev offsite which isn't an issue - the VPN just sucks takes like 5 mins to write a 60KB pdf.rodzilla
    • I've never worked with a corp's VPN that was good. remote access has always sucked, slow, constant drops, log-in issues, permissions labyrinths...Gnash
    • some vpn insight:
      https://www.equinux.…
      Gnash
    • well shit gnash....rodzilla
  • section_0140

    Well, anytime you're dealing with large images / PSD's, it's gonna be slow.

    I'd say just use Git, but it's mostly for code, and chokes out on large files. There is Git LFS (Large file storage), but I don't have any personal experience with it. https://git-lfs.github.com/

  • sted0

    Have a cheap vps at a hosting provider, just to manage the domain what will be used for access, and some maybe vpn+emergency backup.

    One local server has access to that domain and can communicate outside the local network. Simple shared folders would do to manage the files and some of the machines can be reached trough this one.

    Don't use offsite development servers, you can create a clean or specialized environment in an hour or so (x-code download usually takes an hour :D) in hyper-v or vmware.

    Use one machine for storage what you can mount into any device around the network, keep this simple and smart, build a backup strategy based on this.

    we have like 3 main folders and use the materia/work/product project dir layout
    /work folders have daily backups
    /product are done weekly
    etc.
    on aws.

    and you have to do all of that on 1gbps min.

    • thats basically the setup we have, but i had to cut the text because i don't want to give out details.sted
    • Thanks - appreciate your insight - very helpful!rodzilla
    • I honestly think this is exactly what we are doing the problem lies within gnash's supplied link above - fuggin' upload speedrodzilla
    • we had 1gbps for 2 years that was awesome, right now we're fine with 2 250mbps fibers, one dedicated to the project related.sted
    • lol i'm drunk but you got it, right now it sucks because the workers doubled... so yeah if you don't have a prop connection forget it :Dsted
  • zaq0

    there are different tools tor different jobs.
    For Sketch / Photoshop I recommend plantapp.io
    Git for development.
    Dropbox or GSuite for document share.
    Slack to keep things handy and monitor if there are any updates you are watching.

  • ideaist1

    This thread makes me loathe SaaS.

    • It's mirroring the strategy of video/audio streaming business(es) that basically adds up to the price of cable 10 years ago.

      : (
      ideaist
  • rodzilla2

    Appreciate everyone's feedback