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

if your data is gone, well, I can't help you.

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.

to start, your cheap sata disk is going to max out a 100Mb/sec for /sequential/ transfers. Now, cut that in quarters, because two different guests streaming data to the disk make sequential random. so you have 25MB/s. double it, as they are probably raid-10ing the disk (at least, that's what I do) so we have a best case 50MB/s to share.

Now, they are probably in a box with 32GiB ram. say they give a gig to the dom0, and you are on a 512MiB guest. that means you are sharing with 62 total guests. So your fair share is less than 1MB/sec of hard drive transfer.

Of course, best case, nobody else is using the drive and you get all 200MB/s, but with 60 guests, that won't happen often.

Hard drives suck. Sharing hard drives makes them suck a lot more.

Note, I know almost nothing about the actual slicehost setup; what I'm describing here is guesses about their setup based on what I know about xen and what I know of my own set up.

My understanding is that Linode is perceived by light users to have better I/O throughput, but this is because they monitor and take action against heavy I/O users. (I think this is a good idea, and may implement it myself)