In-house Hosting Options

[Peter Bowen]

Eric,
    There are a ton of reasons to keep this stuff in house, the best of 
which is "you get really good bandwidth for the office." Followed 
closely by "It's cheap" :)  However, going through all of that work 
still leaves you vulnerable to over or underbuying bandwith, and 
reliability issues.  Generally, if you can go with either a co-lo or a 
hosted solution, you will save money and headache.  When choosing, you 
will want to look at facilities AND homing, that is how well connected 
to the internet is your datacenter/ISP.  If your ISP has to go to SLC to 
go to Denver to catch the backbone, that's two extra hops., and hops are 
generally bad. <WARNING>Here comes a plug (no pun intended)</WARNING>

    We (globalservers.com) have a shared solution that looks dedicated.  
We have awsome bandwidth and protection from floods,etc.  You get root 
and for all intents and purposes it looks like a dedicated box without 
the headaches.  And for what you get, it's MUCH more economical than 
trying to run a farm over DSL.  Finally, we're really well homed, with 
excellent connections to the backbone in Los Angeles.  

    Allright, plug off...  Whatever you do, hosting it yourself is cheap 
but not reliable, and as reliablility increases, so does cost and the 
relationship is hyperbolic - it takes an order of magnitude more money 
for each increase in reliability.  My advice is let somebody else spend 
the money and figure out how to share so you're only paying a small part 
of the total cost.  Good Luck.

-Peter

Eric Jensen wrote:

> Going to be launching a business management system and we are going to 
> host the web sites instead of distribute our code base.  This is where 
> my knowledge gets pretty sparse.   We would really like to run our own 
> servers from our location isntead of colocate.  I looked at a few ISPs 
> and what they offer for DSL lines with a static IP and have not been 
> impressed.  For $150-200 a month you can get a 384kb/s line that is, 
> according to them, perfect for web hosting.  That just doesn't make 
> sense to me.  When most users now days have closer to 1.5mb DSL (at 
> around $30-40 a month mind you) how could you support even 10 hits at 
> a time and not get complaints about it being too slow?  We were 
> thinking of getting one line with a static IP and then a bunch of 
> 1.5mb standard lines and merging them.  We think that will work fine 
> for download, but not upload since we would go out on a different IP.  
> Seems like it would really screw up DNS, amongst other things I'm 
> sure.  So what are our options if we want to keep the equipment 
> in-house?  Am I missing something with these 384-ish DSL lines 
> designed for small-medium businesses?
>
> Eric Jensen
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