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

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

#51

Post by biturd »

Im confused. I figured the new best way, with the insanely cheap prices was the cloud. It saves you redeploying in the cloud later. Need more CPU, RAM, etc, click a button, clone a server.

Looking into Amazon even, their prices are fractions of a penny on bandwidth. And I see reddit dump all their servers, drop employee load, and it seems the home garage is rad for testing, but maybe not that great, as one day, if it all works out, you have to retool for the cloud anyway.

P.S. I am doing hosting of non critical stuff myself on a Comcast 50/10 line which is really 60/15, on a few mac mini's, which use near no power, and seem to stay up pretty well. I am just toting around with my personally ideas mostly. I like the fast local lan access, and I jump to a VPN so I can feel it like the rest of the world would. But it is only temp, until the idea proves viable, and then off to the cloud I go.

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

#52

Post by duck »

chopsueyar wrote: post #49
duck wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, according to this article [1] a burglary happens every 15 seconds. I highly doubt any government agency is that efficient, but even if it did happen and you have a backup you could be back live in a couple minutes. Just like the scalability comments below allude to, the key is having the infrastructure right and then everything else is easier. [1]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/artsandliving/homeandga...

Actually, I think the key is what you just mentioned... backup.

A backup won't do you any good if you don't have something to restore it to, so that is why I said infrastructure is the key.

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

#53

Post by lsc »

i would argue that if you are only spending $500 on hardware (I'm assuming 8GiB ram there?) you are right on the borderline of co-lo vs vps.

you can get reasonable co-lo for a hundred bucks a month, and ridiculous amounts of bandwidth for two hundred bucks.

also, total up your power costs for the server. the thing is California charges you more the more you use; your top marginal KwH can be pretty expensive, especially if you live with other people.

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

#54

Post by lsc »

ericb wrote: post #40

What users notice most is latency, not bandwidth. 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 u…

the latency difference between fios and co-lo is going to be tiny. 10ms vs 50ms at most. (yeah, 5x difference, but it's still fifty friggen milliseconds)

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

#55

Post by chopsueyar »

dtegart wrote: post #46
mynameishere wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not exactly, what is being proposed is more along the lines of making your own dough, sauce and then a pizza versus ordering a pizza or cooking a frozen one. Your home made pizza might taste a bit better, but why are you spending your time making pizza's when all you want to do is eat them?

Because they taste better.

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

#56

Post by lsc »

Zak wrote: post #11
fierarul wrote: post #9

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.

speaking as a hosting company, setup fees are /really really nice/ - I've got to go buy a rather expensive server and get it to you - now, obviously, I've priced it so that I make a profit long term, but I need to go buy another server /now/ not long term.

Personally, I address this by having pre-payment discounts. cover your account for a year and I knock off 20% (and usually use the cash to go buy a new server) - I also allow people to sign up and pay monthly (at a higher rate, of course) but with my current price /discount setup, the majority of my income is from pre-paid customers.

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

#57

Post by chopsueyar »

Rampidbyter wrote: post #37

I did it for my company. Except replace garage with basement. I have a business ISP account with a dedicated staff rep. and 24/7 on-site repair. It costs just at $77 a month for 10/5 with 5 static IPs. 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, o…

Awesome.

You could add an auto-switchover generator to that setup for less than $1.5k.

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

#58

Post by chopsueyar »

duck wrote: post #52
chopsueyar wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I think the key is what you just mentioned... backup.

A backup won't do you any good if you don't have something to restore it to, so that is why I said infrastructure is the key.

Infrastructure won't do you any good if you don't have a backup, like you mentioned in your GP post.

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

#59

Post by moe »

fierarul wrote: post #41
pmjordan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it is annoying; they do sometimes have specials where the setup fees are waived or reduced. I have to say their service has been excellent for me though (I've used them for years). 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.

It's not just annoying it's counterproductive. In my head setup fees trigger warning bells on two areas: 1. The company is so un-automated that it actually needs considerable human intervention to prepare a server and doesn't actually bother to include this basic operation into their total cost (they sell servers after all). 2. It's a trick to squeeze at least the 150 euro from you. Because if I find out in the first…

As lsc explained the setup fee is not normally for human labor but part of the hosts cost calculation.

Serious hosts will give you free trials (before you pay the setup fee) any time, unless you ask for special hardware that they themselves have to buy first.

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

#60

Post by lsc »

brk wrote: post #10

$100/mo? That's $40/mo. more than I charge for 1U of real datacenter space with a 5Mbps (shared) connection. Plus, if you actually start generating a lot of traffic I'm not going to randomly cut you off or throttle your connection like Comcast might.

you know what bothers me? when people quote co-lo price in rackspace without power. If you are willing to go with 1/40th of a 15a circuit, 33.7 watts usable, I could sell you 1u for $20/month and I'd be doubling my costs. Of course, running almost anything in that power envelope would be nigh impossible. that's barely enough power to run three 3.5" disks and nothing else. the OP is talking about a quad-core CPU, so we're probably talking at least 120 watts. If you are selling 120 watts and a reasonable amount of bandwidth for $60/month, you are significantly below market (and I'd like more information)

but yeah, you do have a point, if he's willing to spend that kinda scratch on connectivity he can get a box co-located. From what Ive seen of the market around here, he's going to be a bit over $100/month, (but, if you are way cheaper than that... seriously, lemme know. I get people pestering me all the time about co-lo and I usually send them away.)

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