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 :)

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?

The question is...

[grub]

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

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.

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

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

[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...)

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.

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!