What server infrastructure to use for desktop software development?

Question

I am in a startup company working on a new digital content creation desktop tool. We are now setting up an infrastructure for a small team of software developers in multiple locations.

We are looking into setting up a common server wich will store all code, and host version control (Subversion), built system, internal documentation, Bugzilla, etc. We will need administrative rights and want to compile, do nightly builds, etc.

What would be the pros and cons of 1.) buying a server for our premises 2.) arrange managed hosting for a server in a data center, or 3.) something else. We are still bootstrapping and obviously very concerned about cost, security, and backup (with our own server on premises, we would need a separate back-up solution).

Thanks in advance for your insights!

Answer 1

If you are all, or mostly, in one location, having a local server is going to be significantly less of a load on your external bandwidth.

If running locally think about off site backup (could be a team member has a secure location and swaps amongst some external drives: at least three so at least one is always off site).

Answer 2

If I were starting a new company, I would seriously consider JIRA Studio, which is a hosted version of all the Atlassian tools. The tools are excellent (especially JIRA), and the pricing is very reasonable and scales up based on number of users. You really want your people to be focused on developing your product and not tinkering around with the development infrastructure. Hosting these tools also frees up your development server for builds. You might also want to consider using Github for source control.