mikelly - 6:15 pm on Apr 29, 2005 (gmt 0)

I thought this was a newbie section...

I hosted from home in around 1995, and I did it for 5 years. Currently I am a hosting provider and I lease the servers.

Leasing is a much better deal because of the issues already mentioned such as having someone else always upgrading your software, actual redundant load balanced backbone connections, automatic backups stored offsite, lower costs, 24 hour support staffs, backup power generation, and the list goes on...

As for how many sites you can host on a server at home or away, most people use less than 50MB of space on a large site and less than 500MB (way less) of transfer. But they over estimate thier usage by a factor of about 100 unless they are streaming or storing graphics/music.

Someone in this thread mentioned 3/4 terrabite, I can't even imagine using that much storage space. That would hold everything I will see in my entire life (or about 75 years worth) at 250x250px @60 FPS

Databases can also get quite large.

The people in this forum are probably an exception to this rule.

As a summary, if you are just going to need a few dozen servers then leasing is the way to go because of the infrastucture costs.