31–40 of 94 posts
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?
there is no sense to plan for scaling when you are small. you are wasting valuable resources for things that might not happen. Just spend $10/mo on a shared host and you'll be good to go. if your product is in such a high demand, that it crashes from the traffic...then you can quickly spend a few bucks on a dedicated server. Until then preparing for millions of users is just stupid, since chances are, you'll only get…
Agreed. And what's the marketing strategy? If there isn't one, then the business will stay small.
It's fine until your garage burns down / floods, or someone digs through your street's connection. Those things are unlikely, but even with a backup you're going to have pretty horrendous amounts of downtime. You could lessen the impact by having some off-site secondary system ready to go at any moment, but then at that point you might as well be renting a server.
And depending on where you live you could add until someone walks in and walks away with your server (and all of your user's data on it).
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.
It's fine until your garage burns down / floods, or someone digs through your street's connection. Those things are unlikely, but even with a backup you're going to have pretty horrendous amounts of downtime. You could lessen the impact by having some off-site secondary system ready to go at any moment, but then at that point you might as well be renting a server.
For me, it's a peace of mind thing. I have better things to worry about than hardware.
Also, read the fine print on that Comcast plan. Their residential service is now capped at 250GB (not sure about business-class). In my experience, Comcast is the last company I would want involved anyways. Our service goes out frequently enough that I now have a backup WiMAX modem for my laptop.
Edit: thanks olalonde
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?
Well, holy cow. If he can cook a frozen pizza cheaper than ordering from dominoes maybe he should be in the restaurant business instead of the software business.
I purchased an older HP Proliant server off eBay with 12 drives for just under $600 shipped for everything. I installed VMWare ESXi on the machine and then created 5 virtual machines. One machine for an email server, one for database server, one for web, and two staging machines for database/web server. Total cost for those machines was zero, and thanks to virtual appliances I can expand.
At that point I have redundant power supplies, raid hard drives, and plenty of backup swaps. I also can configure the server whenever to allocate resources as needed to the machines running. I can quickly copy and create a new server whenever I need one, which is really nifty.
In the end the only down-time I have is when my power is totally out. If I host I usually have about a 97% up-time excluding regular maintenance. The machine running constantly makes less impact than my Dell XPS 720.
It's fine until your garage burns down / floods, or someone digs through your street's connection. Those things are unlikely, but even with a backup you're going to have pretty horrendous amounts of downtime. You could lessen the impact by having some off-site secondary system ready to go at any moment, but then at that point you might as well be renting a server.
Besides fire/flood/theft/etc, is the garage clean and climate controlled? I used to run a server in a basement during college, and burned through 2 disks and one motherboard before I finally figured out that warm, damp, and dusty basements with dirty power supplied by 1920's wiring weren't a great place to run servers. For me, it's a peace of mind thing. I have better things to worry about than hardware. Also, read t…
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…
For example, if every page asset has an extra 1 second latency, then you are adding several seconds to your base page load time as all those 1 second delays stack up. First the main frame has to load, then if you have a subframe, the subframe has to load, then finally the content in it. Nest frames or other content, and suddenly your site seems sluggish for a single user and you're nowhere near your bandwidth limit.
I've had Fios and Comcast and on both latency wasn't great. Latency on their networks varies widely by location and is harder to keep consistent and build a good marketing message around, so they don't sell on latency.