dac

For the record, slickdeals has newegg running a deal on the TS140 Xeon for 275 bucks after rebate w/ free shipping. Hard to pass up on this one if you need a server box.

Dropbox Pro is a nice offsite backup option if your data is not too large. It's less than $100 a year for 1TB, and lan sync is nice for maintaining copies on multiple local machines.

The license can be moved to another machine simply by calling MS support. If you have access to an MSDN subscription (check your company or school if they get a discount) the 2012 R2 option is pretty cost effective. You get up to 5 R2 Standard license keys per subscription, and 5 more for R2 Essentials as well as all the other OS licenses. Otherwise, the OEM pricing for R2 Essentials is about $360, which is about 1/2 the price of R2 Standard.

Unless you need massive amounts of storage, your best bang for the buck these days is a ThinkServer TS140. Amazon and Newegg have been running regular sales for various configurations, and I recently purchased an E3-1225v3 based model, 4G ECC RAM, no HDD and no OS for ~350. No hotswap bays, but 4 internal bays with a 4x4TB RAID10 configuration is plenty of storage for my needs. Mobo is based on the Intel C226 chipset (Haswell) and has IPMI as well as RSTe -- I'm running Windows 2012 R2 Storage Spaces and software RAID. Best part is that the thing is absolutely dead silent (no fan noise) and comes with 1 year of support. For those who need more storage, the larger TS440 includes 8 hotswap SATA/SAS bays matched to an LSI RAID controller. This is also on sale w/ E3-1225v3 for around 400 bucks. This machine is larger and heavier, and is definitely not silent as it includes a redundant capable PSU with high RPM fan, but is quieter than most front office servers. Plan on spending around 17 bucks each for HDD trays which aren't include, but I still consider this to be a bargain since the LSI RAID card itself retails for around 200 bucks and you get 1 year of Lenovo support as well.