Ask HN: Anyone hosting their site on servers in their garage?

Why more startups aren't doing this?

I'm all done with slow disk on cloud hosts. I have no budget to pay for a colo or a dedicated host. I'm planning on building a server with commodity components and an Intel SSD. I figure I can build a server with a quad core AMD chip, an Intel SSD and extra memory and Disks I have lying around for about $500.

A Comcast Business Broadband package gets me 22 Mbps/5 Mbps for $100 a month. Double that for 50Mbps/10Mbps.

I don't need 5 nines of reliability. I'm willing to deal with a couple of hours of down time in an emergency while we're getting off the ground.

Why aren't more startups doing this? I understand that you might want to buy decent "enterprise" hardware at some point if your site takes off. But, hardware is dirt cheap compared to the crap offerings you get on cloud hosts. Am I missing something?

I've done this before when testing out micro business ideas, and if they take off then I get a more professional hosting setup.

Like you I build a fast box myself from parts and made sure I had a good broadband provider with consistent upstream speeds.

If you're idea's successful, you'll soon know about it.

- because you need a good connection with high upload rate. Which may cost a lot, depends of your location. And you will need at least TWO. - because your cat can eat a part of you utp cable => no connection - because your neighbor decide to dig a hole in the ground and he hit an AC wire => no more electricity - because of temperature. If you stay in a hot area (35°C/95°F) you will need an air conditioner unit (on my 2 years old machine there is a difference of 5-10°C with my AC on vs AC off)

Do you want more?

- because a good ssd costs A LOT and ssd's have some Disadvantages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Disadvantages - because two (or even four?) 10k rpm hdd's (you will need raid after all, right?) costs pretty much

Do you still want more?

- because a VPS is pretty cheap http://www.slicehost.com/ :)

Over an year this costs you about $1200 for bandwidth + $500 for hardware + electricity/service. Let's say an even $1600 or ~ $135 / month.

$135 / month buys you two 1.5GB Linode instances or one 2GB Slicehost instance (I use Slicehost but they seem to be much more expensive compared to Linode).

The reason I see renting VPSs, especially at the beginning, as a smart thing is that you are postponing the actual hardware costs towards a later time, when you are (presumably) profitable. And if you decide to cancel the whole thing, it's just a matter of shutting down the instances and that's it. It just seems much more convenient.

Now, if you already have the hardware and you trust the electricity/bandwidth provider you could self-host. But investing time and money in hardware and self-hosting might just be the one thing that stops you from doing the right job software-wise. (Of course, unless your service depends precisely on the fine-tuned hardware that you might manage yourself, but I don't think you are in this situation -- it's just a cost discussion).

This is the 2nd day in a row I've heard of hetzner.de. If they remove their one-time setup fee of 149 eur I might give them a try.