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

Depends on who it's for

[andy753421]

If it's just my stuff I prefer to run my own, mostly for the learning experience. However if I'm hosting things that a lot of other people use I think it's better to have a company host it. They generally have better uptime, and if they do go down, the blame isn't on me :)

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: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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear sir, I am very interested in your Mexican squirrel-love vacation photos, and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

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.

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.

Re:employee handbook

[Fishin76]

Since I work for a Global Company in a information Security postion, I may a few insights to add. Statemachine talked about your information on company assets and how that information is now theirs. The reverse can be true also. If you brought in your own machine and put company data on it, theoretically, that machine belongs to the company. As we all know, even deleted, overwitten, zero-ed out data can be recovered (with different levels of labor respectively) from hard drives and other mediums. Companies will not and should not let you take your personal machines out of the building. This represents a avoidable risk to that companies intellectual property and corperate information. Email, files, software, and any other electronic communications methods that you use and/or provided by your company are theirs. This includes Cell phone converasations on company cell phones.

              Most companies indemnify their employees. In other words, you, personally, would not get sued for an illegal act to commit fraud against customers using company assets. The company would. But, you would probably get fired in attemptng to settle the lawsuit.

A few things to remember:

      PC does not mean Personal computer. It means Property of your Company.

      Keeping Personal data on company assets is a big NO-NO.

      Keeping Company Data on personal assets is a big NO-NO.

      If you need something to do your job better, ask your company first.

      If you need to bring in an asset you own, get permission and know the rules.

And the number one thing you can do: USE COMMON SENSE.

I know not every company follows these rules, mine does. They make sense, allbeit, sometimes difficult to follow.

CYA is a very good thing. If your using the CYA methodology, your already following the rules.

The question is...

[grub]

... are you a geek or an end user?

ISP port blocking

[Mr_Tulip]

If you host it yourself, make sure taht your ISP has no plans to block the port(s) you plan to use for the servers.
There seem to be a lot ISP now, at least here in Australia, who routinely block port 80, 25 and a host of others.

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: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.

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.

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.

My thoughts on the issue

[green pizza]

I debated this very same issue, you can read my thought on it at my homepage:

http://www.cocacola.com/~robert

Re:My thoughts on the issue

[grub]

ya dick, I fell for it. :)

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.

My Advice

[AKAImBatman]

1) Don't run your own Email Server. It's a pain in the rear, and it'll get blacklisted for being on a consumer subnet anyway.

2) If you have a website that you need to guarantee availability for, get a cheap webhost like LunarPages or IPowerWeb. (Note that blogs fall under this category. Don't run your own blog unless the Blogger.com service doesn't meet your needs.)

3) If you have something personal (such as vacation pictures, web scripts for testing, an experimental web app, etc.) run your own server. It's a rewarding experience and can teach you a lot.

4) DO NOT run ANYTHING on your employer's servers, unless you have explicit permission. It was one thing to make quick use of them back when bandwidth was hard to come by. But now that everyone and their dog has server-grade bandwidth, there's no reason to be making illicit use of your employer's server.

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.

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.

it depends

[amazon10x]

I pretty much host everything on my own servers now for a couple of reasons.

1) Most importantly, I learn all kinds of nifty things doing this that I can apply in a workplace environment

2) I don't have to pay anything. My cable connection + comp is expensive enough; I don't need to pay for that all again.

Obviously, if you have no need to learn about hosting servers and also have some extra money to spend, paying for a server is better. This way you have a better guarentee of uptime (assuming you pick a good host) and you usually will get better speeds this way (I only have 384k upload on my connection so downloading from somewhere else is very slow).

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

[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.

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.

Re:Employment goes away - have a backup plan

[munpfazy]

Doh! That should have said,

"Professor John Smith <jsmith@somewackydomain.com>"

Didn't realize the tags would get eaten even when posting in plain text. (Clearly this is some new definition of "plain old text" of which I was not previously aware...)

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.

Requirements?

[Morty]

So, what are your requirements?

• Do you need the server to be up 24x7, or is some amount of downtime acceptable?
  
  
• Do you mind rebuilding your server when you change jobs?
  
  
• Do you mind rebuilding your server when you change hosting providers?
  
  
• What budget do you need to stay under?
  
  
• Do you have time to perform backups, routine software upgrades, and other maintenance?
  
  
• If your backups are in someone else's hands, will you want to perform periodic secondary backups in case their backups become inaccessible to you?
  
  
• How much do you want to learn, vs. having it Just Work?
  
  
• Will your employer get pissed off at you if you use your company's resources?
  
  
• How much bandwidth, CPU, and other resources do you need?
  
  
• Do you want physical access to the server, or is some virtual setup good enough?
  

This is a multivariable optimization problem. There is no right answer for all circumstances. Which is why some people host their own sites, some host at their employers' sites, some use colocated servers, some use virtual servers, etc.

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.

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.

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.

Unless you plan on getting /.ed...

[martinultima]

Here's what I say: If you don't mind a slightly slower Internet connections and have no intentions of being /.ed, a home server is perfectly acceptable. I myself used to use GeoCities, Tripod, etc. a lot, but after a while kept having to move over because so-and-so had X feature that I wanted... drove me nuts, trying to find a free host that suited my needs.

Eventually I figured that since we have broadband I may as well set up my own machine as a server. Used to run off my desktop – not a good idea – but now I've got a dedicated machine that's been re-purposed as a server. Everything I need (PHP/Python, MySQL, as much space as I need, NO ADS...) and then some.

And this machine hasn't been too much of a problem even though (1) we've got about six or seven machines online ALL AT ONCE at any given time, including the server, and (2) since it's hosting what's now a fairly well-known Linux distro – my own of course, link to DistroWatch to save me bandwidth – and haven't had a problem.

I think the trick is really to just know what you're doing. Don't over-burden your connection, optimize your site for efficient bandwidth usage, use technologies like BitTorrent if you plan on distributing lots of large files, and things should be just fine.

Oh, and one more suggestion: Go with Linux... yes, I'm saying that partially because I'm a Linux developer and therefore would be somewhat biased, partially because it's better optimized for that type of thing, and partially because spending $1000+ on Windows Server for a tiny personal site [or even a large one like mine...] is just overkill. :-)

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.

Simple

[Fishbulb]

Who do you trust?

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

thanks for the responses!

[akutz]

I appreciate all your comments, truly. For the curious, here is my setup at home. I have a 10mbps Fiber connection to my home courtesy of Grande Communications. I happen to rent a duplex in a well-to-do neighborhood of Austin where my wife and I could never afford to actually buy, but the nice side-effect of renting here is that the Austin president of Grande lives in the same neighborhood making this area the first one with fiber to the doorstep :) Oh, and I pay for 3mbps! double-:)

My server is a P4-2.8ghz 83G5 Shuttle with 2GB of RAM. It runs Ubuntu Linux 5.10 Breezy Badger. All this setup does is run SSH (pubkey auth only ) and Apache2 with WebDav enabled so I can access my home directory from afar with ease. Oh, and I require client certificates to talk to my WebDav share for security.

On top of this though I run VMware GSX server. I run a virtual instance of Breezy that is my web/e-mail/ldap/svn server. The beauty of it being virtual is that if I ever need to move it I just move the directory to another machine! Since the VM was created under VMware GSX 3.2.1 I can easily move it into ESX 2.5 or VMware Workstation 5.5.1 (legacy mode). I went this route specifically in case of the need to migrate the server. I also run a virtual instance of Windows 2003 Server Enterprise and Exchange 2003 for testing code and projects on Windows.

I like running my own server, it teaches me a lot, and I feel that I have the minimum amount of competence to pull it off. That said, there are times when I would love to just give it to somebody to run for me!

P.S. I was using Lunarpages, but I got to the point when I decided that I needed shell access to much. However, Lunarpages is a spectacular hosting company and their support turnaround is second to none. Withing 2 hours on the weekends! Those guys rock!

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!

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.

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.

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).

You Are Responsible for Security

[yancey]

I'm guessing you have already considered the relevant University of Texas System polices, the Office of General Council Ethics Standards, and the ITS Policies. Sorry, I work for another Texas university. :-) Universities tend to be generous and tolerant of a personal computer on their network so long as it does not interfere with your work, does not violate any laws or policies, and does not interfere in any way with the network or other computing systems.

With that in mind, know that you and only you are responsible for the security of your computer and that you will be held responsible for any undesireable activity coming from your computer. If someone were to manage to compromise your computer and then attempt to compromise other university systems, you will at least be held responsible for not securing your own system, if not held responsible for anything coming from your computer -- or through it. If you are quite certain that you can keep your computer secure, then by all means run your own server and learn as much as possible. It's best not to experiment with production university systems. Besides, one could argue that using university-owned systems for your own purposes is a violation of the ethics policy. However, using your personal computer on the university network is no different than any student using a laptop.

Running Servers on University Boxes in Ohio (FYI)

[Ohio Calvinist]

Just as an FYI, here in Ohio (as it was explained to me by my HR contact), it is illegal to profit from State owned (e.g. public university) resources such as IT equipment, vehicle, telephone, e-mail box, etc. (ORC 102.04) For example, forwaring "you@yourbiz.com" to the University Central Mail system and making personal business transactions, is (at the opinion of the University) a violation of (ORC 102.02) If what you are doing is of "academic or not-for-profit" interest, it's up to the IT folks/university lawyers what they construe as "within the academic mission of the university." The problem comes when your friend of a friend's boss asks if you'll host his stuff for $juicy_sum_of_money, and you risk it or need to get a 3rd party host if you want to get his business anyway,. You also have to worry about hosting content for a social/political group whom the university (or mid-tier sysadmin) doesn't want on the subnet, you're in a real pickle.

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.

List of personal colocation providers

[ziegast]

I don't host anything of my own at work. Take a look at the Personal Co-location Registry. You'll find a bunch of inexpensive providers for your servers or apps.

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

Ask Yourself the Same Question I Did

[nuintari]

Ask Yourself the Same Question I Did.

How badly do you want to do things, "Your Way?"

I work for an ISP that gives me a lot of freedom to do things as I see fit, and I am very proud of the work I have done, and the machines I maintain. However, I am bound by compatability issues with previous design decisions I don't always agree with. That sort of entrenched policy is impossible to quickly erradicate. Hence, I opted to maintain my own trio of machines that do my bidding.

I do make extensive use of my work servers as well, but for my personal use, I wanted it to be 100% all mine. I have prior design decisions of my own that I regret that have become entrenched, but at least they are "My" mistakes, and mine alone to fix. But I am an insatiable individualist, to the point of obsessiveness.

Just how badly do you want to run a sys your own way? If the answer isn't, "I wanna run a server for myself and possibly a few friends as if I were a demon from hell, sent to restore order to the entire interweb, one puny server at a time." Its probably not worth the effort. If that _is_ your answer, medication?

Obvious Choice for Me

[vga_init]

You sum it all up quite elegantly when you say "Mine, mine, mine!"

If you're an sysadmin type of person (most people aren't, but I am), the convenience and security of running your own servers is very difficult to compromise on. When it's your box, you're in control--you can fine tune it to fit your needs exactly, and you can change anything instantly at your discretion.

Trusting your stuff to professionals is not too bad of an idea, but you have to realize that you're dealing with an organization of people that don't have any vested interest in you or your data. They'll do their best to serve you most of the time, but they'll never be able to do it as well as you could for yourself. Because of levels of authority and control, getting necessary things done for *you* on a machine owned by *someone else* requires you to go through them, and there will be bureaucracies, red tape, and layers upon layers of people who can't do anything to facilitate a solution. Eventually it might get to someone who can, but there is always the chance that they can't or won't.

What if your box needs something special? A custom kernel or special modules? Specific settings on a certain server? I don't know man...

go the personal route...

[solidtransient]

I ran my personal sites off of corporate servers for a few years. There were plenty of nice perks to being on their servers including the fact that it didn't cost me anything. After a while though, I was dying to get off of company ran servers and onto my own personal one... for a few reasons.

1. The company happened to change their settings a lot, causing downtime on the server and downtime on my sites.
2. The company continuously changed their mind on where they wanted their websites to be, forcing a move of all sites every few months. That was a lot of trouble and it never felt like my sites "settled" before they were yanked up and moved.
3. I didn't like the feeling that other sites on the box were being managed by somebody else. I always felt like my stuff wasn't private and that other employees had access to code I had written personally. I don't think anyone ever stole anything, but it wasn't a good feeling.
4. It was hard to switch jobs. Even though at the time I was being paid crap, I still justified some of my being there since I had "free hosting", which was a really pathetic thing now that I look back.

So overall, I'm much happier running my own server instead of riding on somebody elses. The costs are higher but its worth it.

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.