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It's been a few years, but I used to do some webhosting from my house on "business class" cable. It wasn't that much of a sysadmin task once I had things set up

by ja27 16y ago

It's been a few years, but I used to do some webhosting from my house on "business class" cable. It wasn't that much of a sysadmin task once I had things set up. But what killed us was our connection's downtime. I think over a year we were disconnected at least 5 times that we noticed, from a couple hours to a 2 day stretch over one weekend. One tip: if you're not a cable TV customer (just data), when they connect you, see if you can get the tech to physically label your connection in the junction box out at the street with something like "Business Broadband Customer". We were disconnected at least twice by random Larry the cable guys working on neighbors' stuff. He'd see us connected, but we wouldn't show up as a cable TV subscriber so he'd disconnect us. After the second time, I got our guy (same company, but different division) to label our connection and it stayed connected. That solved our longer outages, but we still had shorter ones.

guylhem 16y ago
I did the same a while back in early 2007, when FiOS was introduced in my city in France by Orange. I needed a good server for a custom made webapp (8G RAM minimum, 500 MB with a spare, quad core 64 bit - that was a little expansive in 2007). The cost analysis revealed a low end Dell with a decent CPU, loaded with RAM + dedicated "home" hosting was the most reasonable option, compared to VPS or rewriting the app. I paid 80 Eur/month for 100 Mbps symmetrical - add that power and lost rent costs (it was in a dedicated room of my appartment) for like ~ 150 Eur/month total. The big advantage was a full control - I could do what the hell I needed with my hardware. It doesn't take too much time to do administration as you reported. The only drawback was the Orange Livebox - a brain dead box sold to home users (100 Mbs/20 Mbs for 50 Eur/month) that had far too munch problems for any real use. Seeing the downtime in the first couple of months was approaching 10 minutes a day, I did hook the optic fiber adapter RJ45 directly to the server. With some reverse engineering, running ppoe on a specific VLAN worked like a charm until this june, when I decided to pull the plug. The project didn't catch up, it was very innovative in 2006, it is only moderately innovative now - time to kill it (parts of it will be used for a non profit help for Haiti) Current hardware costs make it more logical to rent instead of build/host/maintain at home.

by ja27 16y ago

guylhem 16y ago

I did the same a while back in early 2007, when FiOS was introduced in my city in France by Orange. I needed a good server for a custom made webapp (8G RAM minimum, 500 MB with a spare, quad core 64 bit - that was a little expansive in 2007). The cost analysis revealed a low end Dell with a decent CPU, loaded with RAM + dedicated "home" hosting was the most reasonable option, compared to VPS or rewriting the app. I paid 80 Eur/month for 100 Mbps symmetrical - add that power and lost rent costs (it was in a dedicated room of my appartment) for like ~ 150 Eur/month total. The big advantage was a full control - I could do what the hell I needed with my hardware. It doesn't take too much time to do administration as you reported. The only drawback was the Orange Livebox - a brain dead box sold to home users (100 Mbs/20 Mbs for 50 Eur/month) that had far too munch problems for any real use. Seeing the downtime in the first couple of months was approaching 10 minutes a day, I did hook the optic fiber adapter RJ45 directly to the server. With some reverse engineering, running ppoe on a specific VLAN worked like a charm until this june, when I decided to pull the plug. The project didn't catch up, it was very innovative in 2006, it is only moderately innovative now - time to kill it (parts of it will be used for a non profit help for Haiti) Current hardware costs make it more logical to rent instead of build/host/maintain at home.