Doing Your Own Hosting

... how much is involved?

[austtr]

To date I have approached web site hosting as something best left to those who know what they are doing. With only a small number of my own sites sites plus several client sites, its always been convenient to pay specialist hosting companies to do the necessary.

I am happy with the service, down time has never been an issue, prices are not a significant factor, there is no compelling reason to change... but

As the business grows, more sites come on-line and the customer base increases. The total spend on hosting fees is currently around US$2500 per annum and can be expected to double in the next year. I'm beginning to wonder if its time to move to my own server set-up while the numbers are still small.

However, I have absolutely no idea what's involved. I'm reluctant to take on yet another learning curve unless the returns make it worthwhile and the management/maintenance task does not become too intrusive.

What was your experience... at what stage did you move to own hosting?

[MichaelBluejay]

Will you have redundant high-speed connections to an Internet backbone?

Are you competent to handle Distributed Denial of Service Attacks?

Can you fix any software problem that might occur on your server yourself?

Do you have an expensive UPS backup system for when the power goes out?

Will you have a remote backup system that automatically backs up all your clients' data to some other location so that in the event of fire or theft you don't lose all your clients' data?

Do you have employees that can handle all of the above for the 16 hours a day you're not in the office, and on vacations?

If you answered Yes to all of the above, then you're a good candidate for running your own server! :)

[LifeinAsia]

The total spend on hosting fees is currently around US$2500 per annum and can be expected to double in the next year.

That's about the monthly cost of 1 H/W person to moinitor/troubleshoot your system on 1 shift. Assuming you can do another shift and you want to have 7/24 uptime, you'll still need another body for the 3rd shift, plus weekends.

The previous post mentioned the other H/W & instrastructure requirements. So I would say you're definitely not a candiate to do your own hosting.

However, you are probably a good candidate to get a dedicated server at your hosting company. Depending on your bandwidth usage, $3,000/year for a dedicated server is pretty reasonable. Then you can add all the sites you want with minimal additional cost. Other than a minor setuip fee for each one (and many won't even charge for that), the only extra fee should be for the additional bandwidth used.

[BananaFish]

If you're on shared hosting, you'd want to either get a dedicated server or colocate a dedicated server. The fees will be about the same and you'll get better performance and have more freedom to install software. However, if you don't know anything about it, it may get pricey to hire someone to configure and maintain things for you.