Web Hosting - Roll Your Own vs Hosting Company?

Case42 asks: "My former webhost company was recently acquired by a larger company that I find myself increasingly dissatisfied with. This presents me with a dillema and a question for all you slashdotters. Do I find another webhost or bite the bullet and host the site myself? I have a decent DSL connection and my site is low traffic, so i'm not concerned about the bandwitdth too much. I'm a sysadmin by trade so i can handle the technical aspects of setting up and running the site without a problem. Despite the fact that it means yet another system to administer i'm leaning towards hosting the site myself, anyone have any horror stories trying to host their site from home, any excellent webhosts out there?" How much traffic could a typical, residential DSL connection take out there, anyways?

Comments

Self-Managed 1U colo (Chicago)

[Nonesuch]

We have a happy medium here in Chicago at the ISPFH co-op.

While we offer DSL (and allow running servers on DSL, with static IPs), many members choose to colocate 1U or 2U servers to run their own web site(s).

This approach eliminates the reliability, latency and bandwidth issues that come from locating the server in your home, at the tail end of a DSL circuit. You get the same high-availability power, cooling, and connectivity as the managed services customers in the next room, at a fraction of the cost.

The biggest difference is that unlike hosting at home via DSL, turning up the bandwidth from 384K to X megabits is simply a matter of a cutting a larger check to the association, and a simple configuration change at the gateway router.

Each member gets a subnet (usually a /29) on a VLAN dedicated to their machine(s), with hard and soft bandwidth limits courtesy of Cisco's Rate Limit IOS Commands. This ensures that no one user can eclipse another, nor steal/spoof their IP addresses.

There are two major drawbacks -- This approach isn't cheap, and hardware upgrades and related repairs take some coordination for physical access to the shared rack space.

We used to host our own...

[NetJunkie]

We used to host our own mail and several small sites. There isn't much to it. You'll just need to set up a system and make sure it's secured. I used an OpenBSD firewall, but even one of the small NAT/firewall boxes will work fine.

The only downside is that you won't get the uptime of a colo center. I used SpeakEasy SDSL and while reliable, they weren't 100%. You just have to ask how important this site is and whether you can be down a day every month or two. Also, do you want other poeple using YOUR bandwidth?

Get a quiet system to run this on, as the whirring of a server will get old.

used to do it

[madHomer]

May I suggest a few things:

mod_gzip: use it. It will speed things up a lot

mail: if you are prone to outages, reboots or loss of power, you probably don't want to send your mail to your local box. Get a cheap $5 account and send all mail there. My connection went down when I was away on vaca and I lost lots of mail.

quiet: I kept my PC in my bedroom. My PC was loud. At times it would keep me awake or I would sleep on the couch. Get a quiet PC if possible

backup: Don't forget to backup. shit happens.

I used to host at home over SDLS, than northpoint went out of business. That sucked.

My replacement was an ADSL connection with a slower uplink and the tendency to drop the connection every few days. The only way to get the connection back is a hard reset of the DSL gateway/router. Damn!

I have since switched back to a 3rd party host.