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Web Hosting - Roll Your Own vs Hosting Company?

Posted by Cliff on from the how-much-slashdotting-can-a-DSL-line-take dept.

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?

1 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Hosting with DSL may *SEEM* like a good idea by chris88 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    But it never is. I work for a small web development company that use to keep a development server on site that was used to let clients watch their site as it got developed. DSL was rarely ever down except for a few miuntes every month at odd times.

    One tuesday morning the DSL just stopped working. Help desk phone lines were ringing busy, clients were mad, and we were pretty much helpless. When we finally did get through to someone at the help desk (the next morning) the person we talked to said it was planned network maintence. Network maintence doesn't happen tuesday afternoons. We were mighty pissed, espescially when this started happenning more and more often.


    Long story short though, your ISP isn't really accountable like a hosting provider when it comes to availability. They don't care you were running a server off that DSL connection. Any home broadband is just too unreliable in my opinion.


    If you wanted my advice, go find a small hosting provider that isn't mainly concerned with how many people they can fit on a stock RedHat machine.

    In my opinion Vex is a group like that, or (shameless plug), UpNIX