Forum Moderators: phranque
Besides, sharing your bandwidth with many many companies isn't such a fantastic deal eithier.
Playing with the numbers (I'm a numbers Geek, sorry), I figure you must do approx $5.2 million gross a year if you were assuming a random 5 hour outage (or total of outages). I don't know what you do, you may do that or more - if so, CONGRATULATIONS! :) But, in either case, that 5 hour loss, no matter what your gross income is (and what the computes out to) comes to 5.7 hundreds of one percent... hardly a consideration to the bottom line.
Now, if you want to talk damage of reputation, burst speed of the pipe, being able to leave the home without worry that the computer could crash while you are away or the 100 other concerns mentioned in this thread - I most certainly agree. I will likely be hosting 3-4 servers in the near future from... well, can't say that here... lol I had considered hosting at home in the past - but the thought never lasted long once I considered the benifits vs the risks.
Matt
I can usually get pretty good generate / battery backup power in an office if I don't have to backup the air conditioning..
I've had everything with a proper dedicated server company (probably the most popular one now) for some years now, and the reliability has been beyond reproach. Sure, I can have it inhouse, but for the money it costs to have it out there, and the fact that they'll bend over backwards to keep me running.. it's worth it. Doing it in-house is just not worth the hassle unless you need something really special and you're trying to keep the budget lean.
>5.7 hundreds of one percent... hardly a consideration to the bottom line.
0.1% to the bottom line is a serious consideration. It pays the hosting bill many times over at the very least. Which actually makes hosting effectively free without even considering the headaches, you and others described, by trying to DIY.
Brett is correct that there are some reasonably large entities on the web that do try to "do it themselves".....but, that doesn't make it the right thing to be doing! Just because others are making mistakes doesn't justify following them ;)
I assume Brett's point was rhetorical, as we all know where this site is hosted ;)
Some people like to maintain their own cars, fix their own plumbing, landscape their own gardens, and host their own sites, I say good luck to these people, but I seriously doubt any of them are good financial decisions :)
Oh, and for the record, I believe in the 'Free Enterprise System'. Although I can change my own oil and do minor work on my car, do basic landscaping around the home and well, I might be able to do very basic plumbing... I prefer to keep other people actively employed and pay someone else to do it. ;)
Matt
Not only that - your domain name would still be designated to your DNS on your servers. Your domain would not resolve to your friends file locations.
Not only that - your domain name would still be designated to your DNS on your servers. Your domain would not resolve to your friends file locations.
You can set shorter TTL (Time To Live) on your DNS server for your zone or if you use a registrar that supports dynamic DNS, their TTL is normally set to quite a short period.
And you should be doing that work for inhouse developement anyway. It will cut your dev time by multiples. It cracks the "tweak and upload" syndrom time to "tweak, alt-tab, press f5" (especially running dynamic stuff like you want).
While I agree that it is necessary to have a test/staging server in house, setting one up, and setting up a production web-server are in different leagues.
You *have* to consider the security aspect for a public server, which just doesn't exist with a test server hidden behind a firewall. Not everybody is up to the task of securing a operating system, or really wants the bother of logging into it every wednesday to download and reboot with the latest set of patches.... In which case, running your own server is probably not the best option.
As for the cable bandwidth and costs, I wish we had something similar in the UK! (at least where I live) :(
The line is from the local phone company. When they provided the ISP, I had almost no downtime at about $180 a month for 5 static IP addresses. I changed to a cheaper ISP, and suffer much more downtime, but now pay only about $100 a month. I run my own domain server, mail server, etc. A friend provides backup for the domain and mail servers, in exchange for me backing up his systems.
Advantages: I have full control over the system. I can put up a new domain for the price of the domain name. Since I run IIS, I can install XML parsers, .NET components, and other things without having to beg the ISP, since I am the ISP. This I consider to be the number one advantage. I could also get most of this by colocating, but I like having the machines where I can watch it, reboot it, etc. I use the DSL line for my internet connection as well, which saves a few more bucks.
Disadvantages: I suffer downtime. Hard drive failures, my ISP screwing up, etc. Since my sites don't make much, it doesn't hurt much, but it is annoying. I also pay electricity for keeping my three server machines running 24/7.
Gripe: When I dealt with the local phone company DSL people (I won't say who, but the company name starts with a V), their business sales and provisioning people were a nightmare. Getting 5 static IP addresses instead of one took literally 6 weeks of daily phone calls. Getting a Usenet feed took almost as long. Getting the DSL reinstalled after I moved was another 4 week daily phone call thing. On the other hand, technical support was excellent, and the few problems I had were fixed within a few minutes. I'd consider paying the $80 a month more again for the better uptime if I didn't have to deal with sales and provisioning. Be warned that you may have to deal with bureaucratic idiocy at these large organizations.
I would never host with an ISP provided machine again. I would, however, probably colocate if I had a site that needed to be up reliably 24/7.
