Personal vs. Work/Free Server?

akutz asks: "I am sure many of you have asked yourselves this question before: do I run my own server, or take advantage of my employer's hardware and/or free online hosts? I recently brought my own personal server online that provides web, e-mail, source control, and directory services for myself. I like the warm snuggly feeling that all my data is on my box and it is mine, mine, mine. However, I have also just burdened myself with maintaining a server when my employer, The University of Texas at Austin, has plenty of servers that I could use for this very purpose. There are also plenty of free services online that do this, such as Gmail and Sourceforge. So the question is, which is better, running your own server or letting someone else do it for you?"

Comments

employee handbook

[spoonyfork]

Check the terms of your employment before setting up shop on your company's hardware. Typically business frown on personal use of company resources. Worse, they pretty much pwn whatever is on them.. including your brilliant ideas squirreled away between email love letters and Mexican vacation photos. Roll your own or find a reliable hosting service.

Re:employee handbook

[statemachine]

This is excellent advice. However, I would go one step further:

Keep all your personal stuff off company computers.

The submitter is correct in keeping his personal items on his own server that he can pack up on a moment's notice. This cuts down on any potential administrative conflicts.

Also keep in mind that your data is flowing over your company's network, so don't be surprised if any non-public connection gets sniffed at some point by a bored admin.

It's better to just keep your computer away from the company you work for, in general, but I know outside hosting or co-location costs money.

Remember, any data on your company's network or servers is theirs, so if you don't feel comfortable with them knowing your personal issues, store your data elsewhere. Even just having a separate computer doesn't stop them from accidentally taking it (or worse).

Think this is paranoia? Consider that the law is on your employer's side. Is it worth it?

Re:employee handbook

[Grab]

Sorry, no sympathy. Would you forward emails with "erotic drawings" (of any orientation) around your colleagues? So why should the company have them on its system?

Frankly, you got off lightly by them letting you resign. Back in '95, most companies (and colleges) didn't have policies on "offensive content". These days they all do, without exception. What you did back then would today be grounds for formal disciplinary action at best, and on-the-spot dismissal for gross misconduct at worst. Whether it's gay or straight "erotic art" is immaterial.

Grab.

Host your own if you can

[cli_man]

If you have the ability and it is not costing you much or anything host your own.

I hosted my stuff at my previous employers and it worked great for a couple of years and then our relationship turned sour overnight and I lost about 3 years of work, I had backups but most of them were where I worked, what I did have backups of on my own was outdated etc.

Running your server is more than warm fuzzies, you can do what you want without anyone looking over your shoulder, plus the experience you gain from it could very well be stuff that could be used on a resume or talked about during a job interview. Much of what landed my current job came from the fact I was my own server admin.

DO BOTH AND BE HAPPY

[StuffMaster]

Do what I do...do both!

I've got an unused machine in my office at a decent university set up as my mail and web server. Unlimited bandwidth (within reason). Free bandwidth! My own box! On-site administration! Nobody knows! Unlimited email space! ALL THE EXCLAMATION POINTS I WANT!!!

easy

[Call Me Black Cloud]

It's time to choose:

a) If you like the challenge of configuring, securing, and running a server, do it yourself.

b) If you just need to use a server and you get what you want...security, access, uptime...somewhere else for free (or at a reasonable cost), then let someone else do it.

Employment goes away - have a backup plan

[billstewart]

Over a decade ago, before all the non-techies had acquired email and when ISPs were still a novel thing, a friend of mine postulated that you should _never_ have your primary personal email contact be your employer, because if you lose that job you've just lost your social contacts and the contact information that potential employers might use to reach you (at least for the kinds of employers that techies want to work for.) He set up a server in his bedroom which he gave friends accounts on to subsidize his bandwidth addiction, and it's since grown into a respectable-sized ISP with several full-time employees.

Normal employment can change policies or downsize, but universities are an especially fickle environment - many of them have policies making it easy for students to have websites, and some of them have strong academic-freedom policies about your rights to posting content, but other universities change policies when they change bureaucrats, and some of them occasionally go full-blast wacko shutdown-and-expel-you no-due-process mode when somebody complains about H4CK3RZ or when some application suddenly sucks down 98% of the school's firewall bandwidth, or when the RIAA/MPAA hands them a complaint about EVIL FILE SHARING CRIMINALS, especially if the complaint gets handed to an organizationally incorrect person who doesn't get it (at some universities, that's the legal department, at others it's a random grunt in the computer management; it varies a lot.) It wouldn't happen at MIT, but it's standard operating procedure at many state universities, and I don't know about UT.

So if you're going to use a university server, make sure than not only is it ok under the official policies, but that you have automatically-updating backups to your off-campus home computer.

Re:Employment goes away - have a backup plan

[ksheff]

That's one reason to have an email address with a forwarding service. You can have it forward the email to whatever address you like and still give out the same address to friends, family, and business associates.

Re:Employment goes away - have a backup plan

[munpfazy]

I can certainly see the advantage of using a personal domain for email. In particular, using a domain that isn't your isp is a must. I've known people trapped for years with a terrible ISP by the enormous amount of work required to change addresses.

But, it could also lead to serious trouble if your operational identity is closely tied to the where you work. If you're communicating with someone as a representative of your institution (or using your association with the institution to try to get something done that would be otherwise difficult), starting off with a homebrew email domain is risky.

For an academic, it strikes me as a particularly dangerous. Just imagine what your first thought would be if you received a cold letter from "Professor John Smith ". I'd guess that it won't be, "Oh, that must be that guy with a beard I chatted with at a conference last year." More likely is something along the lines of, "Is this spam? Some crank? Should I bother to open it to investigate?"

In a world where most email isn't worth reading and most people get too much of the stuff that is, it is a good idea to make your headers as obviously legitimate as possible. For an academic who probably has a fixed term of many years and can expect months of notice before an account is cancelled, changing addresses isn't really a huge problem.

Adding a personal address for friends and family can't hurt. But, if you're like me, the distinction between friends and colleagues is often imprecise. Even when it's not, juggling two different from-addresses and remembering who gets which is a pain.

Administering your own machine within your workplace may be a decent compromise, although you could lose your transitional buffer that way. Convincing your workplace to let you set up a .forward file and leave your account intact (if inaccessible to logins) for a few months is going to be a lot easier than convincing them to leave a personal machine running.

My own reliability stinks

[Wespionage]

In general, I think that managing your own server is a great way to go for things like this -- there are other issues of responsibility that come into play when using your company/institution to host it for you. But if you're going to rely on any of the services you set up for yourself while also treating the box like a bit of a toy (or at least a minor concern), then be prepared to have decent backup services in place for anything that becomes important to you.

I've been running a personal server now for about three years, primarily for web/email services with a few other things. I approached it as though it would be a little box to tinker on. But as I've come to rely on the services more -- particularly email -- I find that relying on my own availability and attentiveness isn't as carefree as I had thought. Most things on the machine are easily trashed/rebuilt/restored, but I rely too heavily on the email accounts handled by the machine so each time I hose the machine or just feel like starting fresh, it is becoming more of a hassle without also having a backup mail server in place.

There is no clear better. What matters to you?

[subreality]

Choosing between hosting at home and using a hosting account:

Running your own takes effort. You have to install your own software, keep everything patched, fix failing hardware, accept that it's going to break at some inconvenient time so you have to choose to leave your site down or abandon what you're doing to go fix it, etc.

It's a large investment of time. In return you get to have greater control over the software you use, the posession of your data, the ability to just fix things when they break rather than waiting for tech support, etc.

As for using an employeer... Are you sure they want you to? Who owns your data if you do? If you quit, what happens?

As a Tax payer in Texas...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would appreciate if you didn't use state owned, state maintained servers, bandwidth, and infrastructure for personal use.

Easiest

[CastrTroy]

I find by far the easiest way to do it is by paying for hosting. You can get super cheap packages with shared hosting starting at less than $4 per month. This goes all the way up to dedicated machines where the price can get up around $200 a month. There's a lot less to manage, and uptimes are usually pretty good. This way you can spend more time putting the content on your server, and less time making sure the server is running properly.

Hosting work/personal

[topham]

The company I work for would have no technical difficulty hosting my personal website. In many ways they would probably encourage me to do it, as I can use it to gain experience outside of what I do on a day to day basis for the company.

But even if they suggested it I wouldn't do it lightly.

I would rather pay for hosting service and know that if I lost my job tomorrow I would still have the website and domain.

I know that anything I do on the website is mine. I don't use their tools, or their time to maintain it. If, for some reason, they decided they owned something on my website I could, in good faith fight for my rights to keep it as mine. They would have to fight to take it from me, I wouldn't have to fight to get it back.

Keep your homelife, and your worklife separate.

Simple

[Fishbulb]

Who do you trust?

(this coming from someone who still has an answering machine)

Re:ISP port blocking

[dekemoose]

Before co-locating with a super cheap provider, be sure to check into their background if you want mail delivered consistently. Find out what IP blocks the provider has and look them up on various RBL's to see if you are going to have issues. Looks like Infolink (owner of ServerPronto) has had some issues in the past.

Dumb story, but...

[Gherald]

Q. Which is better, running your own server or letting someone else do it for you?

A. Letting someone else do it for you, and rsyncing daily to your own server.

Not company servers, please

[secolactico]

As so many others have said, keep your personal data out of company servers. Otherwise, you are just asking for trouble.

If you want to provide some sort of internet service, even if it's just for yourself, keep in mind the risks asociated with it.

Example: if you run your own personal mail server it might be only a matter of time before some clown decides to spam your domain doing a dictionary attack, and while anti-spam techniques can be pretty effective in rejecting messages, your bandwidth/cpu will still be consumed.

If you would still like to keep control of your email, try a colo box, or a virtual server, or one of them spam filtering services (you point the mx to them and they forward the "clean" mail to you) or even a traditional mail server and "fetchmail" the mail into your own server.

Bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Running your own server on a company's dime without explicit permission is stealing, plain and simple. Why not just use the mail room to send your personal packages while you're at it? In fact, most companies in their bylaws have explicit rules prohibiting this very sort of thing.

shared server

[np_bernstein]

Uhm, have you looked around to see how much it costs to get your web/mail/databases hosted? It's cheap as hell. I started at 2.95/month a few years ago, and now I pay a whopping $9/month. Maybe I'm just insane, but I would *never* consider hosting my stuff at an employer's work, even if they were OK with it and I had no plans of leaving ever. It's just shady. What if your php script that you just threw together playing around and that didn't go through QA had a hole in it and your server got compromized... or whatever.

Leave work at work and home at home,
Nick

Re:thanks for the responses!

[Motherfucking Shit]

You have an amazing residential connection that most of us would drool over, you have it at a discount, and you live in a nice part of town. The problem seems to be solved. If you can afford to rent where you do, you can most likely afford to get a dedicated server at a colo facility (it sounds like maybe that's what you've done?). If you don't like the idea of running everything yourself, look into managed hosting; you'll pay extra for the support.

I'm not going to name names, but if you haven't yet, shop around for dedicated servers. You can find a decent 1-2GHz system with 512MB-1GB RAM and at least 100GB HD, with 1000+ gigs bandwidth, for $100 a month, probably better (dedicated, not managed). It's not going to be the uberbox that your home machine is described to be, but from the sound of things, you don't need anywhere near that much power for your purposes. Austin is a tech hotbed, look local and you can likely find a sweet colo bargain.

If you don't want the extra expense, just continue to run your own server off your phat fiber connection. If Grande blocks incoming SMTP, smarthost from your employer (you set up your local MTA to listen on a weird port; you set up your employer's MTA to act as your MX and forward messages to you on your weird port). That's the extent of employer involvement that I'd ever recommend, and even that, only with their express permission.

Others have given a number of reasons and anecdotes as to why you're better off running things yourself. You don't want your employer controlling your primary identity on the internet, ever. You could live without email for a few days if you had to find a new smarthost, but it would sure suck if you suddenly found yourself locked out of everything. I could be hosting my various personal websites for free where I work, because we've got a number of dedicated servers with space left over. I choose to pay for my own hosting, even after 3 years with the company and no plans to leave. You never know what tomorrow's going to bring, and your employer should never be in a position to fuck with your personal life.

Back to your original question, which is better, running your own personal server or letting someone do it for you? Running it yourself, hands-down. If you don't feel capable, take the time to learn, even if it means gradual knowledge over a period of years. Judging by some of the stuff you've already setup, you're not afraid of the command line and you're not afraid of manuals. Between these two, you can and should do anything you want. The result will be doubly rewarding; not only will you be in control of your own personal realm, you'll also have admin skills that can contribute to future employment.

Good luck!

Just for comparison's sake

[michaelwigle]

You are obviously extremely technical and more than capable of running whatever you want. I don't think the question is really whether you should be doing this at home or work because it's going to take alot of work to maintain regardless of where you base it out of. Although I obviously agree with the others that you are better off keeping personal stuff at home so you don't lose it suddenly due to things happening at work.

But just for comparison's sake, I do all my e-mail personal (and some family members for free) web hosting, and of course FTP server and remote access on a $200 Walmart Lindows machine with it's standard Celeron 900MHz processor (slightly altered so it now has 256 MB RAM and Windows Small Business Server 2003). I set it up once and just leave it alone. It does just fine for simple personal needs and when it acts up from time to time I reboot it and it's happy again. I rarely touch it except to install core server updates and it does just fine. I had wanted to use a linux distro instead (and originally did) but wasn't technical enough to figure out why I couldn't get the e-mail to work so I gave up and installed Windows Server because you don't need to know much to get it up and running. Which, of course, is the plus and minus of MS software. I'm sure my server could be hacked in a New York minute by someone who targeted it but it's been safe from all the standard attacks so far. I'v ealso managed to get my server acknowledged as safe by using some of the new technologies for verifying server info (AOL was a nuisance but I got OK'ed by them too). Keep in mind I'm just a desktop tech and have no formal training on any server software (except a little OS/2 and Novell like 10 years ago.

Personally, as more ISP's start being forced to share information and likely start to sell it I think having personal sercured and encrypted servers is becoming a viable option for those who use the Internet a great deal and want to be able to have control over their online "stuff". Not to mention it's relatively inexpensive. Especially if you choose a linux option instead of the costlier (but easier for average Joe to be taught to use) MS solution. I go to many people's homes as part of my work and I see more and more complex home networks all the time.