Hosting in Office via SDSL (UK)

[Frank_Rizzo]

SDSL is finally being made more widely available, and is now more sensibly priced.

Is it now wise to host a server in house using SDSL?

The biggest barrier to hosting your own server was that you had to get a leased line and they cost £ thousands.

But now SDSL is nearly as cheap as co-lo. So why not host your own servers in your own offices, or homes?

The contention ratio is one possible downside, as is line reliability (no backup lines).

I've always wanted to use my own hardware rather than pay webhosters exhorbitant rentals. It's cheap enough to build your own uber server for an up front £1K, whilst the hosters would want to charge £1K+ PER MONTH!

Being onsite means that HW support will be instant too.

[ogletree]

I have done it without any problems but we did not have a ton of traffic.

[IanTurner]

I've been looking at this too:

Downsides

Contention ratio
No Backup Line - could be long periods of downtime
Better speed at colo provider
All data could be in one place
UPS issues during power cuts
SDSL is about as expensive as colocating a server

Upsides
Instant h/w suport

I have seen server colocation at £50/month if you own the server yourself.

Personally I don't recommend it at the moment.

[Frank_Rizzo]

The problem with co/lo is that it is concentrated around London or the M4 corridor. Further afield and you have to pay a lot more.

UPS shouldn't be a problem - cheap enough these days.

SDSL reliabilty? Well ADSL has been really reliable for me. Very little downtime, although when there has been a problem it's usually been for an hour or two.

What kind of line speed would be acceptable?

I use very little bandwidth (distinct lack of graphics and fluffy bunnies on the site :-) ) usually the bandwidth is around 5-7Gb a month.

At peak times there could be around 100 users of the site each day. Would 256k suffice?

[mcavic]

256k is probably okay if the traffic is very low. But what about getting a virtual private server in the US? Some of them have reliability problems, but I'm using one that's pretty nice, $45/month for 3 GB disk space, and 10 GB bandwidth. It puts your hardware and data far away from you, but you can't beat the price.

[Frank_Rizzo]

Price is not really the problem at that sense.

The problem is that I want an uber server built but I don't want to pay £12,000 a year for something which only costs £1,000 to build upfront. It is the extortionate costs of leased line, or the extortionate costs of webhosters (who think if you want such a powerful server you must have more money than business sense).

On the point of SDSL reliabilty how about this:

Run a server on sdsl but also have one of those £29/month dedicated servers as a failover. There are some dns and ip sites which can detect if a main server goes offline and redirects browsers to a second location.

I don't know if that works well in practice but reading the sites it looks the perfect solution to reliability problems.

[IanTurner]

Run a server on sdsl but also have one of those £29/month dedicated servers as a failover. There are some dns and ip sites which can detect if a main server goes offline and redirects browsers to a second location.

I like that idea, automatic DNS updates seem to work quite well. If the site has a lot of dynamic data I would worry a little about using this kind of failover.

You can also look at dual bonded SDSL to increase the speed, I know at least one provider who has this capability here in the UK.