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We have half a rack at a colo in Portland. All our public sites live on a single fast box. Before that, everything was running off a fast desktop machine sitt

We have half a rack at a colo in Portland. All our public sites live on a single fast box. Before that, everything was running off a fast desktop machine sitting behind a Business DSL line at Sam's house. I'd highly recommend that option, since it's so cheap compared to VPS and you get to use as big a box as you like (and as many too). You only really outgrow it when your bandwidth starts to max out the line, which is a lot later than you'd expect. Twiddla survived it's first few Reddittings in that garage. It was only for SXSW and the simultaneous TechCrunching, RRW'ing, LifeHackering, and Mainstream Pressing that followed that forced our hand in moving it someplace a bit more professional.

paolomaffei 16y ago
except when you DSL line goes down.
- jasonkester 16y ago
  In two years of self-hosting, we had a few minor downtime instances, but nothing to do with the DSL: http://expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/08/redundant-is-never-redundant-enough.html http://expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/08/redundant-is-never... You run the same risks hosting at home as you do in a datacenter. Things can go down and it's your job to put them back up. There's no greater chance of the ISP cutting off a Business DSL line that happens to point to a residence than to a business downtown.
  - andrewvc 16y ago
    Depends on where you live, but your house doesn't have redundant connections and service contracts to fix them ASAP. Your home net connection may be reliable, now, but if something bad happens it could be down for days, not hours.
    - jasonkester 16y ago
      When you're starting out, your service can, quite frankly, be down for an entire day and it won't kill you. Once you've got enough traction that downtime could be a money-losing issue, you can step up. But let's be realistic. Plenty of real businesses host their public site from their own office. At least, several of the startups I've worked for have their own server closet. Many of them don't have redundant internet connection nor redundant power. It's OK to be a little bit flaky. Look at the poster-child for flakiness (some microblogging service that seems to be popular among, well, everybody), and you'll notice it's still pretty successful even with it's weekly tech-blog-worth downtime. Your average little startup probably doesn't need five nines from the word go. What it does need, though, is a backend setup that only costs $50/month. Hosting from your home-office will give you that.
      - limmeau 16y ago
        Depends on the business. I wouldn't outsource, say, my bookkeeping to a startup web company whose servers I notice to be unreachable for a longer amount of time.
    - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
      >Depends on where you live, but your house doesn't have redundant connections and service contracts to fix them ASAP. Might not be a problem if you can pick up the server and relocate it to another DSL terminal (and re-point your DNS). Indeed a home based server might be more robust, line goes down or electric is off then move the server. YMMV a lot.
  - Hinrik 16y ago
    I like the irony of the fact that that site is down so I can't read the article titled "Redundant is never redundant enough".

paolomaffei 16y ago

except when you DSL line goes down.

jasonkester 16y ago
In two years of self-hosting, we had a few minor downtime instances, but nothing to do with the DSL: http://expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/08/redundant-is-never-redundant-enough.html http://expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/08/redundant-is-never... You run the same risks hosting at home as you do in a datacenter. Things can go down and it's your job to put them back up. There's no greater chance of the ISP cutting off a Business DSL line that happens to point to a residence than to a business downtown.
- andrewvc 16y ago
  Depends on where you live, but your house doesn't have redundant connections and service contracts to fix them ASAP. Your home net connection may be reliable, now, but if something bad happens it could be down for days, not hours.
  - jasonkester 16y ago
    When you're starting out, your service can, quite frankly, be down for an entire day and it won't kill you. Once you've got enough traction that downtime could be a money-losing issue, you can step up. But let's be realistic. Plenty of real businesses host their public site from their own office. At least, several of the startups I've worked for have their own server closet. Many of them don't have redundant internet connection nor redundant power. It's OK to be a little bit flaky. Look at the poster-child for flakiness (some microblogging service that seems to be popular among, well, everybody), and you'll notice it's still pretty successful even with it's weekly tech-blog-worth downtime. Your average little startup probably doesn't need five nines from the word go. What it does need, though, is a backend setup that only costs $50/month. Hosting from your home-office will give you that.
    - limmeau 16y ago
      Depends on the business. I wouldn't outsource, say, my bookkeeping to a startup web company whose servers I notice to be unreachable for a longer amount of time.
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    >Depends on where you live, but your house doesn't have redundant connections and service contracts to fix them ASAP. Might not be a problem if you can pick up the server and relocate it to another DSL terminal (and re-point your DNS). Indeed a home based server might be more robust, line goes down or electric is off then move the server. YMMV a lot.
- Hinrik 16y ago
  I like the irony of the fact that that site is down so I can't read the article titled "Redundant is never redundant enough".