Chris writes:

Hi Matt,

Have you considered just running your own machine at home? If you can
get by with 384kbps upload speeds, then you should definately consider
it. I have been running various web and blog servers on my humble home
machine (its an old 266MHz pentium) for several years now, with
very good results. The beauty of it is… you have complete control,
and costs are minimal…

Chris

I’ve almost, but not quite, considered this before. Unfortunately, I’m on a rather noisy loop, tend to have lots of small breaks in connectivity, and cannot upgrade from a 512kbs line. Those of us who will be on the server have sites we don’t want dropping off the air, and paying customers who expect the same. Sadly, I think this would be a dangerous route, at best.

If I lived on a better, faster loop, I could at least consider it. However, I’d have no redundant power, no server security (“Hey, Brad… why did you unplug this machine?” “Oh, I wanted my stereo in the hall while I brushed my teeth.” “Uuhhh… OK…”), and at £40/month to get into the 8Mbps ADSL range, that would be roughly $70/month, bringing me quite close to the cost of a powerful dedicated server. Assuming, of course, I could get a connection that fast, which I can’t.

Robin wrote to say that he’s looking for a host, and he’d throw some cash my way if I gave him a cardboard box in the front yard of whatever server we end up on. This is good to know, and I’ll take his money (something about fools, money, and dwarves wearing puffins on their heads), but… we’re not an ISP. Anyone who threw in with us would have to be aware that yes, your site would stay up, and get hit by backups… but we aren’t about to pride ourselves on how quickly we can respond to requests to restore three files from yesterday’s backup. Hmm… perhaps we could just expose the backups to the user…

Anyway. Keep the ideas coming. Just before going to bed, I looked at Colos; my big fear here is that the hardware might crap out. However, I’m currently talking about about renting a server for $1200/year (which I’m sure we can land a consulting gig or two to cover some or all of those costs, but not put bread on the table), which is a steep-sounding price to me.

I can eBay a server for dirt. Of course, then I’m running on a used rackmount with an unknown history. This may, or may not, be a bad thing. Buy-it-now prices range from $100 to $500 for low to mid-range servers; all fine for our needs. At $250 each, I could buy a pair of IBM Netfinity 4000Rs, with 1GB of RAM, a pair of PIII 750s, and one drive (I’d probably have to buy four new hard drives). While cheap, this gives me redundant hardware. If I go higher-end, I can pick up something like a 1GHz, 512MB RAM, 2x80GB disk IBM xSeries 300; having the ability to do RAID1 is important.

Of course, I live nowhere near an affordable Colocation facility. This worries me.

Macminicolo looks fascinating, I must admit. You mail them a mini, they put it on a rack. While $500 for a Mac Mini with 512MB of RAM and an 80GB disk looks promising, it is a slow, laptop drive, and I don’t know how long the Mini will last running 24/7 as a server. Assuming it’s kept cool, I suppose it could last a year or two without too much trouble… of course, I’m a bit unsure. I IM’ed the guys there yesterday; in the 6 months or so that they’ve been hosting Minis, he’s seen no massive hardware failures. While the cost would be the same as an IBM rackmount (hardware intended to be run 24/7), the Mini was probably not designed for production server use, but it does, at least, come with a 1-year waranty…

More food for thought, anyway.

A number of projects I work with are hosted on one machine. It’s a small VM from Bytemark that has served very well. However, we’ve really outgrown a 64MB VM. It’s time to move our projects onto real hardware; we need more RAM. More than 3GB of disk would be nice as well. Really, though, it’s the memory that’s killing us.

In terms of dedicated hosting, CyberWurx has been around since 1997 (a near eternity in the internet business), and their prices are as good as anyone else’s. I was also impressed that a Real Human Being(TM) responded to my initial query. My big question is: are we ready for a $100/month dedicated server?

This gets us a 3GHz machine with 512MB of RAM, and an 80GB disk; for a one-time fee of around $75, we can ask them to drop a second disk in (allowing us to run RAID1). This seems like a big jump; however, there doesn’t, at the moment, seem to be a middle-ground. Or, any middle ground that I can find (in terms of features) costs nearly as much as their top-of-the-line dedicated servers.

I’ve explored colocation; we could, in theory, eBay a $300 unit, and colo it somewhere; this might get us down to as little as $50/month in costs, but are we really further ahead? If the box went to hell, I’d be nowhere near the hardware; this would be a big problem; while I can talk my father through problems with his email client, I don’t think it would be a fun phonecall, trying to explain what to do at the console of a 1U server…

Any thoughts from the ‘net? We need a space where we can run Apache2 (with WebDAV, for Subversion), MySQL and Postgres, Exim, Courier, Clam AV, and (here we go) the PLT Webserver, and likely OpenLaszlo in it’s full Tomcat-servletted-glory. Currently, we’re not CPU-bound in our applications, but memory-bound, and we just need the ability to run some servers that are outside the purview of your typical hosting provider. jadudm at gmail if you’ve got any insights, suggestions, or offers to make.