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

Academic Institution

[frosty_tsm]

The beautiful and special thing about Universities is they often make resources like this available for their faculty, staff, and students plus have a sizable staff to do the management work for you. If you don't mind some of the regulations they enforce, then I'd go that route as it should be the path of least resistence / cost.

Re:Depends on who it's for

[nblender]

I run my own servers. I have one somewhere in europe and I have one elsewhere in this city. I also have another backup on the same continent but in another country Granted, not an option for everyone; but I've had my setup across 2 jobs and have lost no data. The boxes update one another so with a little DNS updating, I can switch over to any one of them in the event that I lose one of the others. My employer is flexible with their internet connectivity and has setup an 'employee lan' that is outside their firewall. They provide a rack where employees can put their own machines. The rack is not anywhere near any other internal network resources so these machines are topologically fully exposed to the internet and treated just like any other random host on the internet. A number of employees have their mail/web servers in that rack. The understanding is that it is for low-volume personal hosting; on the honor system.

Re:My Advice

[grub]

I run my own mail server but forward through my ISPs mail server. That fixed the dynamic-IP bounces I'd occasionally get.

Right on the money with #4. "don't shit where you eat" I always say.

Re:Depends on who it's for

[PunkOfLinux]

Agreed. Unfortunately, nobody has been able to figure out how to access my machine from the outside world. It would be nice, as it's a royal pain in the ass to ftp EVERYTHING to the server a friend lets me use to host it. It's only a small site, so even on the low bandwidth (~60K up) connection i have, it would work fairly well. Plus, I wouldn't have to worry about nagging my friend to get stuff setup (like ftp and postgreSQL).

Once i get this going, it's GOING to go on a more powerful server with more bandwidth. But until then, a 'personal' server with relatively low bandwidth will suffice.

Re:Employment goes away - have a backup plan

[cli_man]

Also while your at it, make sure to buy your own domain and use that for your email, domains are almost free these days. So when the campus shuts off your access and throughs you off the grounds your backups won't do you much good when nobody reconizes your email address when you try to contact them again.

Your online identity is precious, most of the people I know online I know mostly by their email address, if someone shows up anouncing some great story about losing their email address and they really are who they say they are and can we continue where we left off with such and such big deal we were working on I would really hesitate and have to work my trust back up again.

My own.

[awing0]

I run my own boxes off my employer's electricity, but on an internet connection I barter for. I'm work in electronics recycling, so I trade hardware for bandwidth with an ISP in my building. Rackmout LCDs, UPS hardware, blade servers, you get the idea, for 3 IPs on a connection that's a bit quicker than your standard T1. My employer gets to save hosting costs for services related to online resales of recycled hardware by utilizing the servers and internet connection. And my hosting setup is all done with used post-recycled equipment.

Re:ISP port blocking

[cli_man]

The one I am looking to move to is http://www.colopronto.com/ I know I ran across a couple of others on google but I don't remember the sites. Now I have not used the service I just mentioned so do your research, my server is currently with RackSpace.com and I am paying $225/month for a dedicated server. As soon as my rackspace contract is up I am going to switch to a co-located server.

Re:Host your own if you can

[Antique Geekmeister]

If work can tolereate it, do it at work because you can test out features that work is not ready for yet. New OS's, webserver software, new content management features, new databases, they can all be tested out on a work-sponsored playspace in a way that would never be permitted on a core server. Then you can turn around and integrate those features into your work services with some practice and some debugging in hand before possibly slapping down a core server.

Free is not really a good price

[infonography]

My landlord provides free cablemodem, downside it's shared with about 5 other people and it drags down my torrenting or gaming with their VoIP phones and surfing. Damnit I need my fansubs!!!

At work we got rackspace out the wazzoo so my boss would let me put a server on our corp network if I keep it low key (loki?). Downsides are if I get fired/quit I got to move it out with a quickness. I also need to worry about management asking why a v120 and a Sunfire 280R is in the racks that's not under control of the dev group, they need accounts on it by close of business today..... Not to mention having to explain open firewall ports or making a fast shuffle when we need to expand in a OMG hurry.

I could run the boxes at my house but the electrical is circa Ben Franklin, I can't keep them all up at once so I bite the bullet and rent a rack for $350. It's part of the costs of building a bigtime app cluster as a hobby. Seti will be pleased until I get it going for real.

Conclusion, if you don't have a long term plans/needs for servers, stay out of it. Get yourself a linux box and stick it in a corner. If you want to play with the big toys, you need to not play in the kiddy pool. Real computers need real power, UPS, racks etc. Otherwise they will gather dust in your garage and that $2000 you spent will be 18 months from now gone, as you sell it for $150 on ebay. Deep coat of dust not included.

I plan to do this

[this great guy]

I have thought about it a lot. I work from many different locations (at work, at home, at random places on my laptop using a wireless Internet provider, etc) on a multitude of projects, and basically my need is to have a permanent access to a secure Unix server offering flexible services on my DNS domain, in order to:

• Use it as a mail server, get myself a permanent email address (independent of my current employer and/or the current trendy free email account provider), forward most of my current email addresses to this central location, archive some of the emails without having to worry about the available storage space, archive the most important mailing lists I am subscribed to, and be able to conveniently access all of this at anytime using a local Mutt instance via SSH (or a remote IMAP/SSL client). Nothing is as fast as a textual mail interface to manage a huge amount of emails.
• Use it as a web server, because I need to have a permanent HTTP address for some of my stuff (articles/papers I publish, etc). When I say "permanent", I expect to use the same domain and URL in 30 years.
• Use it as a handy Unix shell available at anytime, from which I have direct access to the Internet: no fscking fw, no high-latency DSL connection, convenient end-point for my private VPNs, etc.
• Store and edit the data that I use very frequently: current open source projects I am working on, etc.

That's why I plan to buy a 1U server with at least 2 disks in order to do RAID 1, and I will have it collocated in a datacenter offering affordable prices. I plan to use an encrypted partition (think /home) to store my data, this partition will have to be mounted manually (to enter the required passphrase). This way if someone power off the server and try to steal my data, the encrypted partition will be useless for him.

Ideally I would have preferred NON-managed colocation (i.e. I would responsible for the physical installation of my hardware in the rack, and I would have access to it 24/7), but since it's too expensive I have chosen to go for managed colocation (i.e. I send my server to the colo company and they install it, but I would not have free physical access to my server).

Re:Dumb story, but...

[Kadin2048]

I'm surprised this didn't get modded up. It should.

It gives you the experience and (questionable) geek cred of running your own server, but without any of the hassle. You can even run your server as a virtual instance on your desktop, if it's suitably powerful, I suppose. But the point is you keep everything that the outside world touches in the colo building; you just get to do the "fun stuff" of building your site, your blog, whatever. And if you want to switch hosting companies? No biggie -- you have everything in your house. Or if the your house gets wiped out by a fire/flood/meteor strike? Again, no problem. Well, actually a big problem for you, but nobody reading your website will notice. (As long as you keep paying the bill, of course.)

It gives you uptime, without having to worry about the QoS of the internet to your house -- probably expensive, if available at all -- or the power brownouts, or HVAC, or any of the other infrastructure stuff. And, perhaps most importantly, you aren't risking your job by running your blog on your company's server (which I think is such a uniquely stupid idea, I can't believe anyone in this day in age would actually consider it -- I won't have unencrypted personal IM conversations from my work laptop ... much less run a server from the office!).

In the end I don't think it would be that much more expensive an option than running a server out of your house and doing it right would cost; for the price of a good internet connection (synchronous, 1d onsite support) in a residential area, you can get a 1U colo or an VM on a shared server, and use a computer you have around the house to build the site and rsync it to the colo. In my mind, that's the way to go.

Re:employee handbook

[tverbeek]

Don't count on the employee handbook to tell you whether it's OK.

Back in '95, I set up a web site on my desktop machine at the college where I worked. Nothing bandwidth-intensive, just playing around with HTML, publishing info about myself and things I'd written, etc. My boss knew I was doing it, and didn't particularly care. The only person directly affected by it was me (and even running on Win31 for the first several months, I rarely noticed any performance problems).

But the site somehow came to the attention of the upper administration, and some of the material on it did not meet with their {ahem} moral approval. (No, I wasn't running a pr0n site; I'd be rich by now if that were the case. But I was openly gay and had some erotic drawings on the site.) By the end of the day, I found myself in a conversation in which it was suggested that I resign.

Believe me: there was nothing in the employee handbook about what I'd done. There were no disciplinary policies or procedures involved. "At will" employment (which describes the jobs most of us have) doesn't require anything of the sort. All it requires is someone in authority saying "get rid of him". In retrospect, I can say that storing my personal files like this on a college-owned machine was the one of most bone-headed things I've ever done.

After that incident, I briefly tried commercial hosting, but quickly ran into problems with my provider that left me thinking "I can do it better than this". So I got me an ISDN line, installed Red Hat 6 on a spare Pentium box, and never looked back. OK, I admit: When the web server periodically locks up for no apparent reason, or the power goes out for several hours and the portable generator won't start, or a configuration oversight gets my mail server blacklisted as an open proxy, etc. I find myself wondering why the hell I'm trying to do this myself. But the feeling of self-sufficiency, the freedom and power of root access on everything, and the incredible learning experience of doing it all myself keeps persuading me that it's worth it.

It's also made me all the more valuable to the (entirely different) college where I work today. Where I'm careful not to use college resources for anything personal.