NAS stands for network attached storage. It is a box on your network whose whole job is holding files: shared folders, backups of every computer, old versions of documents you can roll back to. A server is the general version of the same machine. It can do everything a NAS does and also run software, record cameras, host a database or run an AI model. Most small offices are choosing between the two without anyone explaining the difference, so here it is.
When a NAS is enough
- You need shared folders, mapped on every computer, with each person seeing only what their role should.
- You need backups of every computer and of the shared folders, with a copy sent off site every night.
- You want to roll back a file, or a whole folder, to how it looked last Tuesday. Snapshots do that, and they are the fastest way back from ransomware.
- Nothing else has to run on it. Your software lives in the cloud or on its own vendor-hosted system.
When you need a full server
- Your software has to run on site. Dental imaging, practice management, some accounting and point-of-sale systems install on a local server by the vendor's requirement, often Windows Server.
- You have cameras. Recording a handful of cameras around the clock is real work for a machine, and it needs drives sized and protected for footage.
- You want AI on your own files. Running a model in the building takes a processor, memory and usually an accelerator card a storage box doesn't have.
- You want one machine for several jobs, instead of a storage box, a camera recorder and a computer in the corner all needing updates.
Why the box from the store isn't the whole answer
You can buy a storage box off the shelf, put two drives in it and call it done. The hardware is rarely the problem. What goes wrong is everything after: nobody turns on the off-site copy, nobody notices the drive warning, nobody tests a restore until the day they need one, and the admin password is on a sticky note. A NAS or a server is only as good as whoever is watching it.
That's why ours come with a care plan. We watch drive health and temperature every five minutes, apply the updates, and test a restore every month on the Managed plans, the same way we watch every site we run.
What each one costs with us
Our file and backup server is the NAS: a purpose-built storage system with mirrored drives, snapshots and an off-site copy. The camera recorder, practice server and private AI server are full servers. Every package is priced on the servers page, and the configurator prices any build as you pick parts, with a written quote before anything is ordered.
Written by Nikita Huttenlocher, founder and lead engineer at Huttenlocher Technologies, a web design and software company in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.