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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?
You asked if I know of any good web hosts and I host with http://www.ProHosting.com They're not too big and not too small. Excellent support and good pricing. I have not tried to host my site at home but that scares me with my Qwest DSL because... Hey it's Qwest! I guess it depends on the kind of reliability you want.
768 down, 300-something up. I think I'm only guaranteed 128k up. My site took an average of 460 unique requests over the past two days, minus the Code Red nonsense (which is about an equal volume, seriously). Looks like about 30 unique people per day.
/.'d. :-)
I rolled my own because I wanted the experience, and because my ISP wanted $80 extra, per month, for a static IP. There was no one in town that I trusted to co-locate with (one was being sued by a school district, and the other I used to have email with and came to despise). I also wanted to try several different mail servers, with different OS's, and rolling my own was the only way.
If you don't mind not having the Gold service contract and some sort of guarantee that your connection will be up 24x7, try it from home. Buy a nice, quiet PC that you don't mind having on all the time, and buy something low-powered since it's going to run constantly. Expect to add $10 to your monthly power bill, minimum.
It's not that bad. Friends and other people don't comment about the slowness of my connection, and I'm not a chronic/compulsive downloader, so the connection's relatively traffic free. About twice per month I'll download over 50MB at one sitting.
And finally, I'm posting anonymously so that I don't get
It's just better that way, I get exactly what I want and how I want it with no "Oh we can't do this yet because we don't know how" type of shit. So I host kernelcode.com off a dsl connection and so far so good; (used to have it on a cable connection but it was problematic) I haven't gotten any major complaints about speed even though it is slow when it hits around 8 users at the same time (loading the page at the same time) but it works and I'm happy with it; if there is something i want done I know I can take care of it.
So all in all if it's not a heavy bandwidth site then do it on your own. If it starts to get heavy you could always get a fractional t1 or ship it off to a hosting company. Until then, do your own stuff because at the end of the day when something needs to be done you're gonna end up doing it yourself or walking someone else through it anyway.
The only word of advice that you need at this point is, "Don't get slashdotted," and everything will be hunky-dory.
:Peter
Unless you've got a site like Slashdot, I strongly recommend hosting off your own DSL line. It's extremely cheap (even free if you were already paying for the line anyway), and it's so much less troublesome than dealing with a hosting company.
...for a while anyways. I've always run a Linux gateway for my home network, so I figured, adding Apache would not be a big deal. And it wasn't, so I was happily hosting my own website, plus a couple more for a friend of mine.
This of course was in the good old days when Rogers Cable was not yet Rogers@home, and they were giving out static IPs. (I live in Toronto, Canada). Right now they have dynamic IPs, and they actually drop your connection on purpose, just to change your IP. Kiling dhcpcd and then restarting it solves the problem, but it's annoying nonetheless. This would definitely be a problem with DSL too.
There are some work-arounds. One is to get a domain name with dyndns.org (e.g croco.dyndns.org), which can be updated through scripts any time the IP changes. Then set your real domain name to resolve to croco.dyndns.org I haven't tried it, but it might work. Of course, it adds one more layer of latency on an already slow connection. Not to mention another failure point (what happens if dyndns craps out on you?)
Another way that I can think of is everytime the IP changes to log into your registrar and change the IP the domain resolves to. But this is tedious, unless they also support changes through scripts. I am yet to find a registrar that does.
But those are not the biggest problems (small bandwidth and dynamic IPs). The show stopper for me was the reliability of the connection. You might not notice the out times during the night or when you're at work, or simply away from your computer. But believe me, they happen. And someone trying to visit your web site will too. Worst of all is that in my case, Rogers doesn't even bother announcing the outage. The worst example? I was in the middle of my university course selection when the connection crapped out on me, and I lost all the changes I made. Needless to say, I was fuming! The fact that my web site wasn't available either was a minor issue by comparison.
So I say find yourself another decent web host, if you care about the reliability and availability of your site. There are plenty out there, good and cheap. But if you don't care if your web site might die on you without any notice, then by all means, host it yourself. It's an enjoyable experience, and you'll learn something.
When Eidola was Slashdotted, it was hosted on an old PC running Apache and Linux, over DSL, and it did just fine. (It's now hosted on Sourceforge, but at the time, it was just DSL.) It's worth mentioning that it is a very low-bandwidth site, but still -- the DSL took it in stride. In fact, my friend who was hosting didn't even notice that he was being Slashdotted until he saw the link to his server on Slashdot!
It's also worth mentioning that reason I switched to Sourceforge was that his DSL provider went under. For a little project like Eidola, that was OK. But if you need uptime, pay somebody to host.
Besides @Home being a cable provider, it depends on your Terms of Service (TOS) for whether or not they can cut you off for this. My provider (unpaid plug: www.toad.net RULES) does not have such a limitation, and, I think that I'm even allowed to sublet the bandwidth (can't remember, so that part is not a promise.) Other providers, like Verizon, WILL cut you off and try to charge a hefty fee since you essentially would be in "breach of contract".
I host several pretty major (but low traffic - 200-500MB/mo total) sites on my 640/128 DSL line and have not experienced problems at all.
You are correct, though, about setting up a business (legally) and getting a tax break, etc. Bud DSL is often SDSL, so your uplink doesn't suffer.
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.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
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.
Have you ever tried to set up a non-profit organization? Or justified the budget at one?
IANATA (I am not a tax attorney), but this line should probably be treated the same as any home office or business use of the personal car. For the home office you have to measure square footage (and prove exclusive use as an office), for the car you have to maintain mileage logs.
So you should track the network traffic and characterize it as either personal or business....
Except this isn't quite right. You can turn off a dialup account, but you can't turn off a DSL connection where people can hit your site at any time. There needs to be some way of accounting for availability.
Because of these secondary factors, you could probably get away with deducting the difference between your business DSL account and a cheap local dialup account. Then if you're challenged, you can at least demonstrate a reasonable effort to account for personal use of the business resource. But if you try to claim the entire expense, you may have the entire deduction denied and have penalities assessed.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
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
"Not be mean, but <mean remark>."
I'm sure we didn't see anything like Yahoo-scale traffic, but we still saw several tens of thousands of hits in the first few hours -- certainly more than your average home-hosted site is going to see on an average day. (His got more traffic in 24 hours than it had previously in its entire lifetime of several years.)
Get your own server and run your 'hosting company' for 10-20 people. Make some small cash on the side hosting personal sites (just enough to cover the expenses maybe). Nobody can get too mad about no customer service or less than stellar uptime because they're paying like $5 or less a month, plus they're mostly your buddies.
With the little extra cash you could probably afford a commercial DSL with the money you clear.
My host is doing this, and it's the best of both worlds. He gets my $6/month and I get a shell account and enough space and bandwidth to amuse myself. Except for some cgi startup woes (my bad) I've had no problems and he's been great. In fact, he's a heckuva lot more helpful than customer service from my ISP.
My father is a blogger.
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.
The question is what you want. Examine what a "Hosting Service" provides:
Is your DSL service static IP, Always?
Can you afford the downtime of a residential-grade circuit?
Can you afford the downtime of power failures, or the cost of a UPS?
Maintain your own hardware?
Maintain your own backup hardware and schedule?
Don't get me wrong, I've hosted a web site from a home over 56K frame relay and later ADSL for years, without a problem.
I prefer to host it myself because it gives me the control over my system that I prefer. I also make no money from the site, so there is no real risk to me if it goes down for a while for whatever reason.
Five-Nines guranteed reliability is not cheap. If that is important to you, keep the hosting service. However, unless you earn your living with that web site, I cannot imagine it is worth the cost.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Figure out my email above for more.
I really don't check other prices, this is simply what I want to host a domain. So no bitchin if it's to high or not the right amount of space or whatever.
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
I use NPSIS for webhosting and e-mail, and I have been very happy with them for the past 2.5 years. The customer service is great, and they continuously improve their setup. Their prices start at less than $8/month - you should check them out.
The price is too high ;)
/. ? He should be able to answer the question himself...
Seriously, I have been kicking around the idea of getting a unit at rackspace or something and offering webhosting services. Then I see some of the posts here for basic hosting starting at $3/month with 2.5GB traffic!. Jeebus, how do you compete with that?
Kinda takes the wind outta my sails.
Incidentally, I host from home. It's a streaming audio service, so I will eventually need a faster pipe. But if this guy is a sysadmin, why is he even posting on
Co-location is cheap and rock solid. I have hosted with three different companies in the last seven years and have been happy with all of them.
DSL and Cable -- even with the best provider -- aren't the same thing as living in a data center. You house doesn't have a couple of T3s. You house might have a UPS and air conditioning but I doubt it has a diesel generator and a fire supression system (other than your garden hose).
Besides that, for the cost of a DSL line with a static IP address (you wouldn't really think of trying this with a dynamic IP, would you?), you could get co-location on a fat pipe.
Right now, I'm co-locating 1U with Vortech Hosting out of Orlando. It's less than half a mile from where I work. They charge no setup fee and just $50 a month and that includes 10 gig of transfer on a pair of T3s. I can have as many IP addresses as I'd like so long as 80% are in use.
Yes, it is technically possible to host on the end of a residential cable or DSL line but if your time and sanity mean anything to you, don't do it. Find a nice co-location company and hire them.
InitZero
For a real website, first and foremost, do you have a static IP? If not, forget it. You'll spend the whole time either
a. worrying about what happens if they change your IP address or b. chasing after that jumping IP address which will envolve at least 12 hours of downtime to get the registry to update.
However, for all the college kids out there who don't have a lot of money, I gladly help them set up hosting on their DSL connection. Quite a few of our customers do it, but honestly, with our colo prices, I don't understand why. :-)
My site (a very modest affair mainly there for permanent email) is run off a co-lo box. We run sixteen other sites, and the costs are way lower than for a hosting company. Plus you get your own box to play around with as you choose.
In my case, the break-even point was 8 sites. After that, we're saving money by running off a co-lo, not spending it.
Cheers,
Ian
34sp.com has proved very reliable for cheap hosting. I now have three clients sites hosted through them. Hosting accounts can be had for 12 pounds or about $17 dollars per YEAR. In this case something that seems too good to be true, really is turning out quite. Why go to the trouble of hosting your own if you can get hosting so cheaply?
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
That said, my situation is a bit different. I'm not hosting my site at home; I'm hosting it at work. I've got a li'l ol' P200 hooked into my work's connection (small ISP). It's a small site, so bandwidth isn't a problem. (I keep trying to get slashdotted, but nobody cares. :-) And it's a small company, with a big emphasis on learning how to do things yourself. Seems a perfect tradeoff to me: they trade a small amt. of bandwidth and the space under my desk
for some free training for a wannabe-sysadmin. I mean, I've worked w/Linux/Apache/Perl/DNS on and off at home, but it's entirely another thing to be using it for something, you know? I also host a few sites for friends on the box -- again, ones that I don't expect to use too much bandwidth -- but I don't charge them. It doesn't cost me anything, it's free, and my work is also a hosting company.
Anyhow, my point is that I think it's fun to run your own machine, and depending on office politics there may well be a place you could stick a box in the corner. Just a thought.
Carousel is a lie!
If you want to make money from your site, seriously consider spending a few bucks to have someone else host it for you. That includes your e-mail for the site. Its no fun loosing $$$ just because you modem hiccuped that day.
If its for fun you could go a few ways. Use any static space you get from your ISP(and or various free sites) for pics and stuff that don't change (main pages, etc.) Use your home server for dynamic content/databases etc.
You can run a web site behind a dynamic IP that way. I set one up that had my cisco dsl modem send syslog messages to my linux box. The linux box would have a daemon I wrote on it that parsed the syslog for those cicso messages. The syslog deamon would then look for IP changed messages and run a job that would alter any IP references on my web pages to point to the new address and re-load them to the static site. When you hit my static web site it would either just load the page, or auto-redirect to the real page on my server.
Just my 2 cents worth.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
I used to have a similar setup at home. I just got tired of having to scramble everytime a remote root exploit in Bind was published. Otherwise I ran apache & qmail, so bind was about the only daemon that gave me trouble. I mean, after dealing with those issues at work every day (I do R&D in computer security, not system administration, at least not these days), I don't want to have to deal with them at home too. So I moved my http and dns servers over to he.net, which only costs $10/mo for the Basic Virtual Host (which handles my small vanity site just fine). They've been really cool to work with - one of my friend's hosts two sites with them, both of which are much larger than mine, and he's been really impressed with them.
Hope this helps!
-"Zow"