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A while back I showed all of you the Great Wall Of Apple Boxes that was growing in my upstairs loft. I got a lot of emails and comments asking what it was I did that would require so many Mac minis.

I work for a company called Macminicolo.net. As the name would imply, it is a colocation service for Mac minis (and XServes). People send in their Mac minis, and we colocate them so they can run websites, databases, podcasts, etc. The service is comparably inexpensive (compare it to the prices that are advertised in the Google ads at the top of this post) and offers very high speeds and security for the mini. To give you a few examples, we have one customer that runs 500 GB worth of podcasts off of his mini each month. Another customer has a site that gets 800k hits a month and his Intel mini never hiccups. We use minis for our own sites and emails. I’d say that half of the customers run Mac OS X Server, and the other half can do all of their work using regular Mac OS X. Both installs are incredibly powerful and stable.

We have a cage in a data center here is Las Vegas that is full of minis. Here are a couple photos of one of the racks in the cage. (For the privacy of our customers, I blurred out their names and ip addresses.)

Overall, the cage can be quite an impressive site. Often, the data center employees will give tours of the data center to possible customers. Our cage is always one of the crowning stops. I get the same comments every time.

“Are those mini computers?”
“Do those work well as servers?”
“Apple sure is coming along nicely as a company.”

Usually, I’ll be in the cage working while they are talking amongst themselves. Often, I’ll crack a joke like, “Here you see a real Mac IT man working in his natural environment.” That usually gets a laugh. Geek jokes.

Well, I bring all this up to announce that, in cooperation with macminicolo.net, FreeMacBlog will be starting a new video series on how to use your Mac as a server. I’ve learned a lot of the little tricks while working with the company and I think that there are others that may like to know as well. The first video will be posted on Monday and it will deal with the “Initial Setup” of the Mac running Mac OS X. We’re also hoping to give you a couple chances to win a year of free Mac mini hosting from Macminicolo.

I’m hoping that the videos will help accomplish a couple things. For those of you wishing to run a server in your house or business, these videos should help you get it started fast and free. For those of you considering a change in your hosting, or in need hosting for the first time, you might consider a Mac mini. The new Intel machines are incredibly capable right out of the box.

So stay tuned. Grab the FreeMacBlog RSS Feed or be sure to bookmark us for later. I think you’ll enjoy the tips.

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