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It's an option though if in your context, you could tolerate a week (not a couple of days) of downtime, and buy everything again!
Oh - and energy/piece of mind is I believe the scarcest resource for an entrepreneur, too :)
Yeah, I have a server in my garage, AND Comca$t business class (30up/5down with 5 ips for $79 here in Miami), but we only run dev and staging sites on it. Production is always outside.
However, IF you already have the comcast business class, then buy a cheap quad core dell at BestBuy for $699, they generally come with 8 Gigs or ram and 1 Terabyte hard drive. Thats our development machine. Its super-quiet and runs cool in the hot garage.
The only problem is Comcast goes down here a bit too often for my liking. They're maybe down or slow around 10% of the time.
It just hosts an info site and blog for my android app on a pretty basic wordpress site that I have backed up. It's also a nice dev/filehost server. I figure I'll deal with scaling if I ever get to it.
The most visitors I've ever had is maybe 50 a day and who knows how many of those are robots. I wouldn't want to run any extensive server side code or an actual web app on it though.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
One-time setup fees seem like one of the dumbest things a hosting company can do. I can think of few more effective ways to keep me from trying a service.
Note that you might want to check if hosting in Germany has any legal implications for you - German data protection laws are vastly more strict than the US, say.
Because you are in the software business, not the hosting business. Over the long run, a hosting company should be able to keep your website up and running "in less time", "higher quality", and "cheaper" than you can. If your business can host websites more efficiently and effectively than a hosting firm, maybe you are in the wrong business and should become a hosting company for other firms?
1- The cost. Right off the bat you're spending $1,700 that would probably cost you nothing if you hosted it with google.
2- The administration time - why spend any time configuring or administering servers? It doesn't benefit the product when you get this essentially for free.
3- The concerns about security, reliability, single point of failure issues, etc. These may not be critical now, but eventually they will be important and that means you'll have to move. Why not start on App Engine where this is taken care of?
4- Scalability. Again, not something you need now, but rather than re-architect your site and move it later, why not use App Engine from the beginning?
From my perspective, App Engine is such a compelling value proposition that there's no reason not to build your site there. If google somehow becomes untenable, you can host app engine sites on unix using open source software.... and the appengine SDK is open sourced itself. So you're not locked in, other than the "lockin" of providing free service until you get big and a great platform.
The negative replies here are one reason. Competitive advantage may be another.
Personal example: I had a dedicated rackspace server for about $650/month. I was doing basic web hosting, but also streaming video via Flash Media Server.
Now the video server and web server need not be on the same physical hardware. No more than 50 users simultaneously stream video. However, bandwidth overages pushed that monthly fee to over $1600 several months ago (and that was only two weeks into the month).
So, I switched from rackspace to some commodity php/mysql all-you-can eat webhost. I then set up additional video servers on Verizon Fios Business package, with a 35/35Mbps connection.
Now the video is not crucial to the success of the website, more like icing on the cake, so some downtime is acceptable in my case.
However, I do have a UPS that can run the server for approx. 14 minutes underload, which is enough time for me to manually switch to a backup generator.
Of course, I had all these things already (UPS,generator).
For me, it was a no-brainer. $150/month with 5 fixed IPs and I provide my own physical hardware PLUS unlimited bandwidth, versus $650/month.
The momey saved can be spent on hardware or software. As traffic increases beyond the capabilities of the Fios connection, I may consider rackspace again.
OTOH, I have several buddies that would be willing to colocate additional hardware at their FIOS enabled locations.
It simply depends on your needs.
Be careful with Comcast business, though. I believe they have some pricey install fees for business accounts, unless you sign a 3-year contract.
BTW, it is not in the garage, it is in a sideroom w/ it's own unit AC.