Server Hosting from your House - $200 to $300 per month range [closed]

Solution 1:

I just have to throw in my two cents:

If you're looking to "start a business" and are a programmer, go with a hosting provider. Less headaches, you have someone else to deal with the network and hardware issues.

If you're planning on hosting things for anyone other than yourself, DO NOT host it in your house. If other people are paying for the hosting (or even getting it in exchange for something), they deserve to have their site up even when your neighbor's tree falls down on Christmas morning.

If you still want to do it yourself:

1. "Business" grade connections over cable or FiOS won't give you an SLA or the fast (and knowledgeable) support that T1, OC*, etc. will but they're budget friendly, pretty fast, and generally reliable. You'll need static IPs and a fast pipe.
2. Have you thought about hardware planning? How much it will cost to be reliable?
3. Have you thought about the amount of time you will spend (hint: a lot) administering things instead of focusing on whatever your end goal is?
4. Do you have all of the admin skills to do this (think of every piece of software you want to run and every piece of hardware).

I host all of my own stuff in my house on Optimum Business (30/5, 5 IPs). Here are some of the problems:

1. 1 WAN connection. Loss of this brings everything down.
2. No generator, only ~40 minutes UPS power. Power loss > 30 minutes effectively kills everything (the critical UPS starts shedding load at 20 minutes).
3. Residential location - one tree in the wrong spot down the road kills everything.
4. Cable modem and router provided by Optimum Business - no possibility of spares or quick replacement.
5. Failure of a router or switch could bring everything down until I get home from work, and only then would troubleshooting start.
6. No out-of-band management (could possibly be remedied using a cell phone).
7. My electric bill.

Some of the infrastructure and investment (time and money) that goes into it:

1. Standardized on 2 server platforms (HP Proliant DL360G2 and DL380G2). One full spare system ready to run, one spares kit (processor, ram, fans, disks, etc.) for each model.
2. Border router (optimum's router just exposes the 5 static IPs, does nothing else) running Vyatta on DL360G2 - replacement can be built in under an hour on spare system, but no redundancy.
3. Two main switches - 100Mb distribution (content serving and home clients/workstation) and Gig-E aggregation (backend for backups, file transfers, monitoring). Everything uses DNS (two servers, in-house) and DHCP (failover). All hosts dual-homed on public and private VLANs.
4. Though I don't have it done yet, could have Nagios/Puppet control routing, DNS, and switch ports/VLANs so that switch failure would be recovered from automatically.
5. Backups and host build/install/config system to rebuild any failed box onto spare.
6. Monitoring (Nagios, Cacti), centralized syslog.

Solution 2:

For $200 to 300 dollars per month you can get quite a lot of hosted server power and bandwidth. I'd go that route. It will be much more reliable and probably cheaper.

****Update****

You won't get anywhere near production level reliability from a residential service. In the US the cable TV companies generally offer the fastest raw speeds and they offer "Business Class" service. However, this is running on the same infrastructure as the residential service, but you get a different phone number to call when you have a problem.

If it were me (given the budget you've specified) I would get cable Internet access and put my servers "In the cloud" at Amazon or Rackspace. I use rackspace because they offer a lower cost at the low end.

With this approach you have $150 or more to spend elsewhere every month and have the best solution besides.

Solution 3:

it really depends on your location. i pay equivalent of 40 USD [ 300 swedish kronor ] for 100Mbit/s down, 10Mbit/s up link. it's home-grade connection but works within europe as advertised. it's fiber-to-the-building.

there are problems with servers at your home:

• if you are serious about them you need ups'es at least and - if things become business-critical - redundant power lines or diesel power generator
• sooner or later you'll need redundant air conditioning
• it would be nice to get two independent internet connections - but for that you'll need BGP, your own AS number and PI address range - that's quite a lot of hassle, maybe not worth it at the end
• what about 2 weeks of holidays away from home - who will power-cycle hanged machine or switch? who will replace failed disk?

servers rented or collocated at some data-center will give you more peace of mind and at small scale i think will be cheaper. it's just economy of scale - it might be really more expensive to do it inhouse.

you can rent 1u rack server, quad core, 4GB ram, 500GB hdd, 5TB network traffic @ 100mbit interface starting ~150 USD/month. check http://www.serverbeach.com/ for instance.

edit: last mile connection you can get

if you're lucky and can get fiber to your place. price per Mbit/s will be ok, but if telecom needs to build infrastructure - startup cost will be prohibitive. sky and your wallet are the limits of bandwidth you can get.

adsl/vdsl connection over copper is most likely, but that's not suitable for anything except mail-server for couple dozens mailboxes or own webpage. depending on range you can get 1-2 Mbit/s up to 10-20 Mbit/s of upload [ if range is < 500m ].

third alternative is wimax or other wireless solution. this tends to work ok, startup cost is higher then for adsl but lower then fiberoptics. bandwidth - depends on price, can be 10-32-64 or even 600mbit/s [ last one is really expensive ].

Solution 4:

Why bring this into your house? If you are going to spend that kind of money, you can get some very very nice hosting plans in the range of $200/300 /mo. Probably far far better an dmore reliable than what can be done in residential areas, either by technology limits (my fibre is only 20mbit) and I have limits on my data usage as well. In a data center no such items are limits. and the datacenter will have power backup and network redundancy to keep your app alive that simply is not the case with residential service.

I would also mention that handling a remote host, you are setting yourself up for handling how that will work. Your host will probably be able to handle your scaling faster/sooner than the date when the service growing in your house can't handle it and you suddenly have to "move" in the middle the night and suffer some Twitter-style outtage.

Solution 5:

You should investigate "Co-Location" (colo) at a datacenter near you first. Depending on the site, you probably get a couple 100Mbit or gigabit connections and get charged for your peak traffic (95th percentile with data samples taken every 5 or 6 minutes is typical). And a high-sounding price for how much power you get to your cabinet. Upgrading bandwidth is easy in this scenario: just a phone call.

Otherwise, it totally depends on where you are. What country, what state, what phone company, and how far you are from the phone company equipment.

In the US you'd probably want to look for "SDSL" (symmetric DSL; same rate down as up). Normal residential DSL is asymmetric. For instance, I pay $35/month for 6Mbit down, but only get about 1Mbit up. I've seen ISPs (speakeasy, for instance) that have ADSL offerings available for only a little more with a higher bitrate up. You might be able to get a T1, but charges for that can vary significantly and the equipment is more complicated. For hosting servers, you need to concentrate on how much bandwidth you have going out, and mostly ignore how much bandwidth down.

I believe with my local ISP it's possible to get 6Mbps symmetric for about $130/month, but they want you to actually call them and they don't say what they would charge for 30Mbps.