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Why not host servers at home rather than a colo? It's easier to maintain a bank of servers at home and pull a T1 in.Redundancy is why. Most people that care if their site or service is online expect redundant power including battery backup and diesel generators, redundant routing and multiple carriers. These are just the first reasons off the top of my head. Oh yeah, security, as in the physical kind.Your electricity bill would most likely skyrocket if you plan on hosting a mass amounts of server in your home. Also I believe cooling might be an issue so if you decide to play it cheap and not use proper cooling your going to get a lot of heat problems in the servers. Also it would cost a heck of a lot to purchase a high speed network connection at home.The only good thing about hosting your server at home is probably gas. You'll end up saving trips to the datacenter but overall it will still end up costing you more than you will ever save.
Also you have to take in consideration the amount of radiation your servers will be producing. That just isn't good for your health especially if your practically living with your servers.Also you have to take in consideration the amount of radiation your servers will be producing. That just isn't good for your health especially if your practically living with your servers.
I agree with your other points on why professional hosting at home is a not such a good idea and is costly idea but....
What radation though??? I'm pretty sure computers don't produce radation. In fact computers are easily damanged by radation if i remember correctly.The reason people dont host at home is mainly electricity and heat. To host a rack of server's from home causes a lot of heat, and when you cause a lot of heat you need to cool your servers down, so then you install air conditioning units that run 24/7 to keep your servers cool. And then thats when you electricity sky rockets. And to be honest, I don't think many people will want a website hosted on a residential DSL line.Radation, well you could call RF interference a form of radation which almost everything electric produces. Computers dont go pumping out Gamma radiation like a nuclear power station however lolRedundancy, Security, Professional System Admins, Electricity (backup generators), stable network connectivity are the main reasons you should not host at home.If you plan to get the above for home, you'll realise its much easier and painless doing it through a datacenter that has years of experience doing what they do....If everything could be done at home....wouldn't we all be doing just that
Yes , I agree to Redundancy, Security, Professional System Admins, Electricity (backup generators), stable network connectivity. Its very important to have a service that working 24/7/36524 x 7 customer support and monitoring, server maintenance, increase in bandwidth when needed, don't have to wait 30 days for the Telco to install another T1I think what mavarics is saying. Is that why go colo a server in some far away data center instead of hosting it at home for personal use. Am I correct?Using a home located personal use server 1x would not cause to much heat nor a high electric bill. Now if your planning on hosting multiple 1u or 2u servers on a rack or cabinet. You will need to do some cooling and electrical upgrades. That much wattage needed for those servers, UPS backups and routers will need more then just your standard 110 outlets. Pulling in a T1 line isn't as easy as it sounds, first off not many providers allow residential T1 lines. But if in fact you find a isp that does provide a home T1 line, your looking at $250 - $900 a month depending on bandwidth, ips and management. I recommend finding a local small dc in your area, and even if your in a remote location such as myself. There are some business in town that have backrooms with all the proper equipment, power, and security. Talk to them and see if you can pay to host a server in their location.I have 4 servers located in my town alone for personal uses, dual T1 lines for redundancy, diesel generator backup and HiVac cooling system. Even though it is a small location, they use it to host the cities network and the local casinos.Best of Luck !!With todays electric prices (atleast here) it would be damn expensive.Well, hosting at home is like working on your car at home. It can be done, but it's so much easier with a hoist.
For those going on about electricity costs, the one good deal is rental apartments where all utilities are included in the rent. Better yet if the building is under rent control as well
Now, there was this one specific condo conversion that was perfect. Zoned residential/commercial.
It used to be an office building. Every suite had a 200 amp/600 volt triple phase panel. The halls had concealed wiring trays reserved for fibre and twisted pair. And, the building is right on the metro fibre corridors.
Needless to say, there is at least one hosting company in there.
They even have a meet-me room in the basement.Yeah, I actually have a T1 coming into the house via wimax at 3Mbits asynchronous. And several 1U servers. Electricity bill is probably $200+/month but definately less than what it would be if I was renting these 1Us at a colo for $200+/month.
The benefits are I control the machines in terms of the ease of maintenance....and what goes in them (eg, 16GB of ram, etc).
I basically got sick of paying $50/month for a vps with 256M of ram times five month over month....when I had a bunch of 1U machines laying around the house with alot more memory. I got sick of renting rackspace and then after a hard spot back in the dot com years where the rackspace company took my rack and my servers as collateral payment. I not only lost machines but also the data on them back then. I know better now.
Anyways around the servers heating up the room... I think if your house has central air, it really doesnt increase the electric bills that much. Also good servers will be pretty quiet and handle heat buildup better than others. Bad servers have a back story to themselves....I've had to retrofit an el-cheapo 1U server that I bought from tigerdirect.com with water cooling and quieter internal fans in order to deal with power and noise issues.
I think co-los are good once some servers are representing alot of money and downtime results in a large loss of revenue. Then the value proposition is definately shifted towards colos and redundancy across US or world datacenters or a mass of amazon ec2 cloud instances. But for small fry applications and prototyping....I think hosting at home is viable and kinda cool.As for security, I got rifles and guns at home. lol. I highly doubt there's a more secure data center around here than my home. And I'll shoot before asking questions. LOL.Because your dog could accidentaly take the server's wires out of the plug.Radation, well you could call RF interference a form of radation which almost everything electric produces.
Computers dont go pumping out Gamma radiation like a nuclear power station however lol
Yes, computers don't pump out large amounts of radiation. However, it's still not healthy to have massive amounts of computers turned on 24/7 at home. It's like a hybrid car. It's a low emission vehicle but it still produces some sort of emission which just slowly hurts the environment.Yea. Datacenters would be alot more reliable, plus you could probably get 99.99999%. My old host used to host from his basement and then there was a tornado and he lost his server. Being in a datacenter is more secure as well.I think running a rack of servers on a single t1 line would work out about as well as this:Hosting at home is one best option when it comes to sharing your talent with your friends..but when it comes to longterm , secured, easily reachable ( Bandwidth) , availability of your site to global hits then go for better bandwidth LLC... Bcos there is a lot more that inturn makes a site avbl to global people other than best electy, cooling , bandwith, security.... If there is very less important stuffs that needs only friendly sharing then best try home based hosting were you can try a lot more than getting restricted in LLC .. ;-)I made a try and could do just trial and error and share my site only with frnds as the badwidth was very less... And still have one but its a dyn DNS based site hostingThe professionals prefer their servers at data center not at home.Most homes don't have dedicated IPs (at least where I am where this is very expensive to get)Why not host servers at home rather than a colo? It's easier to maintain a bank of servers at home and pull a T1 in.
host your server at home is ok if you just learning something about techie... or host your own site or blog, etc..As for security, I got rifles and guns at home. lol. I highly doubt there's a more secure data center around here than my home. And I'll shoot before asking questions. LOL.
Cool, do you live in Texas?The professionals prefer their servers at data center not at home.
Most homes don't have dedicated IPs (at least where I am where this is very expensive to get)
Because your dog could accidentaly take the server's wires out of the plug.
All of these are actually good answers, but there's one veryy important answer that is usually forgotten:
Because it is AGAINST your ISP's TOS to run a server. I have YET to see an ISP that will allow "home users" to run a server, and believe me, they keep track!
Here's a few more reasons:
ISP's don't tend to have the strongest uptime in the world. What I mean by this is that your ISp can have your service down for HOURS ON END (even professional grade accounts) and thusly your clients as well.
Recently, due to flooding/tornadoes, etc, in Iowa, mediacomm had our node down for 12 hours in the middle of the day. Needless to say, I was screwed, I was unhappy, and very veryy cranky. Their response?
There's nothing we can do, we're working on it
12 hours later it came back up, but I've noticed a huge decrease in speed since.
Reason #2:
Speed is NOT guaranteed
If your ISP says "you'll get up to 8mb/s", cound on 1 or 2, nothing more. The speed of your system depends on the node you're in, how much they pack that node, and you'd better believe they'll pack it fuller just to make money. The more packed your nodes get, the less speed you get, the more of a problem you have, and bam, you've got complaining clients.
Reaason #3:
Upload is typically hugely decreased compared to download
If your ISP says you get up to 8mb/s download, you can expect 1/10th of that for upload.
Since you're using the upload for "hosting", you're going to notice not even a 1mb/s connection to the internet usually, and that's just not good.
Reason #4:
You're at HOME, YOU want to use the internet, not make it available exclusively to individuals who want to host. OOPS, you've got to make it availble to hosting individuals because you've got "paying clients".
A long, long time ago I thought actually about placing a T-1 in my house through a local company. The price just wasn't worth it, and I really couldn't have seen that much benefit from it. They wanted 3-500/month for that, and I just couldn't see the benefit just in that , considering I was just after my own serverYou can't legitimately charge other people and host sites at home. Although, if they know about it, and agree, it should be fine. We have one that gets hosted right out of the closet in my house on an Embarq DSL connection and he's been there for years. I told him at the outset that we wouldn't host the sites on the same network as our other sites and he agreed, knowing full well it would be on a dsl connection. The connection is never down, and I never even hear from him except when he pays the bill once a year. Embarq knows about it, and we have 16 IP's from them with the full knowlege that websites get hosted on the dsl connection. I once inquired what it would take to get a t1 connection and was quoted $1200 a month. When I asked why - since it was 6x less download speed and 2x less upload than we were already getting on a $45.00 dls connection, he said because it is guaranteed to never be down. I passed, since our connection is never down anyway. *Maybe* once every two years it has gone down for an hour, in the middle of the night, and we know about it because any 1 minute lapse will get my cell phone ringing off the hook by the automatic checker.The professionals prefer their servers at data center not at home.
True, you would have to supply a nice place that is cool and not hot, otherwise your regular AC wont work to cool down many servers.edit - if you do host in your house, you need battery backup on everything, including the dsl modem, and the backup has to run everything for at least an hour with no power. I've found that electric power is about 10x less reliable than Sprint DSL, so you're looking at about a $300 2u battery backupGr8 inputs...For initial excitment nd testing you host your site at home server..later when ready for full fledged release go on for some hosting providers who sell space for monthly or yrly charges... I did try the same option as said earlier..but its of no use when your site needs global hits...servers must be avbl alltime..when home server heats up ..performance reduces drastcly..so go on for some initial excitment with home server ...nd later move to DC.... cheers good luck...why are people still posting in this thread, i didnt realize this was such a popular topic lol.when i was a youngin i was hosting gaming servers on my company T1 line. we had speakeasy which runs internap so it was actually good ping.dont expect to make a living on it, id say if it were up to the servers to pay for the T1 line it wouldn't work.bandwidth grows on trees for data centers, home connections your limited greatly. i run fios which is 50/25 and this is the most powerful residential internet service i have seen to date. hosting servers for profit would make it a business line and double the cost automatically if not triple.who in their right mind hosts a website in their closet nowadays? its the age of web 2.0, unless your doing plain strictly text websites, i think hosting at home is the very stupid.i do however run server backups to my house, using my fios connection. it makes sense since the chances that a natural disaster hits my servers in Dallas and my home in NYC is highly unlikely.Yeah i did it to learn. I called my isp and asked them how i could get static ips and better upload. I paid $50 a month for "unlimited" ip numbers and 796k upload (this was a couple years ago). It was good to learn and play with for a little but the thought wouldn't even cross my mind today. If i wanted 1.5 Mbps upload on cable it would cost $199 a month. That alone makes it a retarted idea. I could colo with way more bandwidth for <$100.
Oh and you will most likely not be able to charge for this unless you get a t1 like you said. Even then that isn't much, if my host had a cap of 1.5Mbps I would be dissapointed, unless they charged next to nothing.
If you are wanting to use this as a low budget learning experience I would suggest looking into a vps. You can reload the os whenever you make a huge mistake and it will be cheap.Hey...
It is just like starting a mini data center. If you want reduntancy, security and all the stuff, It would cost the same as that of starting a mini data center, even if its a single server. So if you have such a plan why can't you go for a big one?
yes i think it's a good idea, also a better idea then rent a reseller packet !
Also you have to take in consideration the amount of radiation your servers will be producing. That just isn't good for your health especially if your practically living with your servers.Also you have to take in consideration the amount of radiation your servers will be producing. That just isn't good for your health especially if your practically living with your servers.
I agree with your other points on why professional hosting at home is a not such a good idea and is costly idea but....
What radation though??? I'm pretty sure computers don't produce radation. In fact computers are easily damanged by radation if i remember correctly.The reason people dont host at home is mainly electricity and heat. To host a rack of server's from home causes a lot of heat, and when you cause a lot of heat you need to cool your servers down, so then you install air conditioning units that run 24/7 to keep your servers cool. And then thats when you electricity sky rockets. And to be honest, I don't think many people will want a website hosted on a residential DSL line.Radation, well you could call RF interference a form of radation which almost everything electric produces. Computers dont go pumping out Gamma radiation like a nuclear power station however lolRedundancy, Security, Professional System Admins, Electricity (backup generators), stable network connectivity are the main reasons you should not host at home.If you plan to get the above for home, you'll realise its much easier and painless doing it through a datacenter that has years of experience doing what they do....If everything could be done at home....wouldn't we all be doing just that
Yes , I agree to Redundancy, Security, Professional System Admins, Electricity (backup generators), stable network connectivity. Its very important to have a service that working 24/7/36524 x 7 customer support and monitoring, server maintenance, increase in bandwidth when needed, don't have to wait 30 days for the Telco to install another T1I think what mavarics is saying. Is that why go colo a server in some far away data center instead of hosting it at home for personal use. Am I correct?Using a home located personal use server 1x would not cause to much heat nor a high electric bill. Now if your planning on hosting multiple 1u or 2u servers on a rack or cabinet. You will need to do some cooling and electrical upgrades. That much wattage needed for those servers, UPS backups and routers will need more then just your standard 110 outlets. Pulling in a T1 line isn't as easy as it sounds, first off not many providers allow residential T1 lines. But if in fact you find a isp that does provide a home T1 line, your looking at $250 - $900 a month depending on bandwidth, ips and management. I recommend finding a local small dc in your area, and even if your in a remote location such as myself. There are some business in town that have backrooms with all the proper equipment, power, and security. Talk to them and see if you can pay to host a server in their location.I have 4 servers located in my town alone for personal uses, dual T1 lines for redundancy, diesel generator backup and HiVac cooling system. Even though it is a small location, they use it to host the cities network and the local casinos.Best of Luck !!With todays electric prices (atleast here) it would be damn expensive.Well, hosting at home is like working on your car at home. It can be done, but it's so much easier with a hoist.For those going on about electricity costs, the one good deal is rental apartments where all utilities are included in the rent. Better yet if the building is under rent control as well
Now, there was this one specific condo conversion that was perfect. Zoned residential/commercial.
It used to be an office building. Every suite had a 200 amp/600 volt triple phase panel. The halls had concealed wiring trays reserved for fibre and twisted pair. And, the building is right on the metro fibre corridors.
Needless to say, there is at least one hosting company in there.
They even have a meet-me room in the basement.
Yeah, I actually have a T1 coming into the house via wimax at 3Mbits asynchronous. And several 1U servers. Electricity bill is probably $200+/month but definately less than what it would be if I was renting these 1Us at a colo for $200+/month. The benefits are I control the machines in terms of the ease of maintenance....and what goes in them (eg, 16GB of ram, etc).
I basically got sick of paying $50/month for a vps with 256M of ram times five month over month....when I had a bunch of 1U machines laying around the house with alot more memory. I got sick of renting rackspace and then after a hard spot back in the dot com years where the rackspace company took my rack and my servers as collateral payment. I not only lost machines but also the data on them back then. I know better now.
Anyways around the servers heating up the room... I think if your house has central air, it really doesnt increase the electric bills that much. Also good servers will be pretty quiet and handle heat buildup better than others. Bad servers have a back story to themselves....I've had to retrofit an el-cheapo 1U server that I bought from tigerdirect.com with water cooling and quieter internal fans in order to deal with power and noise issues.
I think co-los are good once some servers are representing alot of money and downtime results in a large loss of revenue. Then the value proposition is definately shifted towards colos and redundancy across US or world datacenters or a mass of amazon ec2 cloud instances. But for small fry applications and prototyping....I think hosting at home is viable and kinda cool.As for security, I got rifles and guns at home. lol. I highly doubt there's a more secure data center around here than my home. And I'll shoot before asking questions. LOL.Because your dog could accidentaly take the server's wires out of the plug.Radation, well you could call RF interference a form of radation which almost everything electric produces.
Computers dont go pumping out Gamma radiation like a nuclear power station however lol
Yes, computers don't pump out large amounts of radiation. However, it's still not healthy to have massive amounts of computers turned on 24/7 at home. It's like a hybrid car. It's a low emission vehicle but it still produces some sort of emission which just slowly hurts the environment.Yea. Datacenters would be alot more reliable, plus you could probably get 99.99999%. My old host used to host from his basement and then there was a tornado and he lost his server. Being in a datacenter is more secure as well.I think running a rack of servers on a single t1 line would work out about as well as this:Hosting at home is one best option when it comes to sharing your talent with your friends..but when it comes to longterm , secured, easily reachable ( Bandwidth) , availability of your site to global hits then go for better bandwidth LLC... Bcos there is a lot more that inturn makes a site avbl to global people other than best electy, cooling , bandwith, security.... If there is very less important stuffs that needs only friendly sharing then best try home based hosting were you can try a lot more than getting restricted in LLC .. ;-)I made a try and could do just trial and error and share my site only with frnds as the badwidth was very less... And still have one but its a dyn DNS based site hostingThe professionals prefer their servers at data center not at home.Most homes don't have dedicated IPs (at least where I am where this is very expensive to get)Why not host servers at home rather than a colo? It's easier to maintain a bank of servers at home and pull a T1 in.
host your server at home is ok if you just learning something about techie... or host your own site or blog, etc..As for security, I got rifles and guns at home. lol. I highly doubt there's a more secure data center around here than my home. And I'll shoot before asking questions. LOL.
Cool, do you live in Texas?The professionals prefer their servers at data center not at home.
Most homes don't have dedicated IPs (at least where I am where this is very expensive to get)
Because your dog could accidentaly take the server's wires out of the plug.
All of these are actually good answers, but there's one veryy important answer that is usually forgotten:
Because it is AGAINST your ISP's TOS to run a server. I have YET to see an ISP that will allow "home users" to run a server, and believe me, they keep track!
Here's a few more reasons:
ISP's don't tend to have the strongest uptime in the world. What I mean by this is that your ISp can have your service down for HOURS ON END (even professional grade accounts) and thusly your clients as well.
Recently, due to flooding/tornadoes, etc, in Iowa, mediacomm had our node down for 12 hours in the middle of the day. Needless to say, I was screwed, I was unhappy, and very veryy cranky. Their response?
There's nothing we can do, we're working on it
12 hours later it came back up, but I've noticed a huge decrease in speed since.
Reason #2:
Speed is NOT guaranteed
If your ISP says "you'll get up to 8mb/s", cound on 1 or 2, nothing more. The speed of your system depends on the node you're in, how much they pack that node, and you'd better believe they'll pack it fuller just to make money. The more packed your nodes get, the less speed you get, the more of a problem you have, and bam, you've got complaining clients.
Reaason #3:
Upload is typically hugely decreased compared to download
If your ISP says you get up to 8mb/s download, you can expect 1/10th of that for upload.
Since you're using the upload for "hosting", you're going to notice not even a 1mb/s connection to the internet usually, and that's just not good.
Reason #4:
You're at HOME, YOU want to use the internet, not make it available exclusively to individuals who want to host. OOPS, you've got to make it availble to hosting individuals because you've got "paying clients".
A long, long time ago I thought actually about placing a T-1 in my house through a local company. The price just wasn't worth it, and I really couldn't have seen that much benefit from it. They wanted 3-500/month for that, and I just couldn't see the benefit just in that , considering I was just after my own serverYou can't legitimately charge other people and host sites at home. Although, if they know about it, and agree, it should be fine. We have one that gets hosted right out of the closet in my house on an Embarq DSL connection and he's been there for years. I told him at the outset that we wouldn't host the sites on the same network as our other sites and he agreed, knowing full well it would be on a dsl connection. The connection is never down, and I never even hear from him except when he pays the bill once a year. Embarq knows about it, and we have 16 IP's from them with the full knowlege that websites get hosted on the dsl connection. I once inquired what it would take to get a t1 connection and was quoted $1200 a month. When I asked why - since it was 6x less download speed and 2x less upload than we were already getting on a $45.00 dls connection, he said because it is guaranteed to never be down. I passed, since our connection is never down anyway. *Maybe* once every two years it has gone down for an hour, in the middle of the night, and we know about it because any 1 minute lapse will get my cell phone ringing off the hook by the automatic checker.The professionals prefer their servers at data center not at home.
True, you would have to supply a nice place that is cool and not hot, otherwise your regular AC wont work to cool down many servers.edit - if you do host in your house, you need battery backup on everything, including the dsl modem, and the backup has to run everything for at least an hour with no power. I've found that electric power is about 10x less reliable than Sprint DSL, so you're looking at about a $300 2u battery backup
Gr8 inputs...For initial excitment nd testing you host your site at home server..later when ready for full fledged release go on for some hosting providers who sell space for monthly or yrly charges... I did try the same option as said earlier..but its of no use when your site needs global hits...servers must be avbl alltime..when home server heats up ..performance reduces drastcly..so go on for some initial excitment with home server ...nd later move to DC.... cheers good luck...why are people still posting in this thread, i didnt realize this was such a popular topic lol.when i was a youngin i was hosting gaming servers on my company T1 line. we had speakeasy which runs internap so it was actually good ping.dont expect to make a living on it, id say if it were up to the servers to pay for the T1 line it wouldn't work.bandwidth grows on trees for data centers, home connections your limited greatly. i run fios which is 50/25 and this is the most powerful residential internet service i have seen to date. hosting servers for profit would make it a business line and double the cost automatically if not triple.who in their right mind hosts a website in their closet nowadays? its the age of web 2.0, unless your doing plain strictly text websites, i think hosting at home is the very stupid.i do however run server backups to my house, using my fios connection. it makes sense since the chances that a natural disaster hits my servers in Dallas and my home in NYC is highly unlikely.Yeah i did it to learn. I called my isp and asked them how i could get static ips and better upload. I paid $50 a month for "unlimited" ip numbers and 796k upload (this was a couple years ago). It was good to learn and play with for a little but the thought wouldn't even cross my mind today. If i wanted 1.5 Mbps upload on cable it would cost $199 a month. That alone makes it a retarted idea. I could colo with way more bandwidth for <$100. Oh and you will most likely not be able to charge for this unless you get a t1 like you said. Even then that isn't much, if my host had a cap of 1.5Mbps I would be dissapointed, unless they charged next to nothing.
If you are wanting to use this as a low budget learning experience I would suggest looking into a vps. You can reload the os whenever you make a huge mistake and it will be cheap.Hey...
It is just like starting a mini data center. If you want reduntancy, security and all the stuff, It would cost the same as that of starting a mini data center, even if its a single server. So if you have such a plan why can't you go for a big one?
yes i think it's a good idea, also a better idea then rent a reseller packet !