The experiment is over.

Months ago, I bought Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Server Unlimited to set up my own “real” server in my office. What followed was a combination of success and frustration that culminated with my decision to host my Web sites on a GoDaddy.com Server.

Why I bought the server software is beyond me. I thought it would be more “plug and play” than it really was. Yes, the administrative tools are great. But the truth of the matter is that the bundled components are mostly Open Source software products that I could have gotten for free and run on a regular version of Tiger. That would have saved me hundreds of dollars.

Okay, so it would have also tripled my frustration level.

I wound up having to install different versions of mySQL and PHP anyway. And dealing with settings files that I really didn’t understand. It wasn’t fun, although I do admit that success was satisfying. But is it all worth it? Not for me. Tiger Server is for a big company that needs a real server, not a Mac user who happens to be serving Web sites and other stuff from an old Mac in her office.

So I’m selling Tiger Server. I just got off the phone with Apple, which confirmed that I was allowed to sell it. I boxed everything back up and put it on my eBay sell pile. I moved the last few items I have to serve (a FileMaker Pro database, a radio’s video streaming, a Web cam) to my eMac, which was just replaced by that new MacBook Pro. Now I’m reinstalling the software that came with the old G4 (Panther) onto the computer. Look for that computer — loaded with a SuperDrive and lots of RAM — on eBay soon.