When I first heard about Windows Home Server, I was fairly excited about the product. The more I learned about it, I was confused about it. What I really wanted to know was if I could use it as a true server which was simply overlooked by all of the review I read, or if its backup, storage, and multimedia stories were really all there was to it.
I spent some time with the eval version of it. I'll say that I think that it is a good product. What people talk about doing with it, in terms of storage and multimedia stuff, it's there and it looks pretty cool. But for me, I really wanted an email server and a Web/FTP server at home. I have this already running FreeBSD, but since I prefer developing in .Net lately, having a Windows server here would get me a lot of motivation in terms of writing more personal applications.
Sadly, Windows Home Server is not well suited for my needs. For one thing, its user management is designed for consumers to "get", which means that I don't want to be using it for FTP purposes, and it won't be a good basis for an email server. Even worse, like Windows Small Business Server, WHS uses its own wizards to manage things, and using the standard tools (which I still included) will break things. Frankly, I think that this is a bad decision. Either make the standard tools do what you need them to do, or remove them. But to leave them there and simply warn me is asking for trouble. This is one of my biggest grievances with SBS, and by itself, it rules out WHS as being suitable for my purposes. I simply don't want to risk "breaking" something while working the way I am used to working. Because of the tools modifications, I did not feel safe trying to install DHCP server, DNS server, or any of the other services that my FreeBSD server provides. If I don't feel comfortable with it, I am not going to use it. Finally, I hate that it is based on Server 2003, and not 2008. 2003 is good, but 2008 is GREAT.
WHS may be a good product, but if you are looking for a lightweight personal server (not just a file/media server, but a personal Internet server), WHS is probably not right for you.
J.Ja