Running Webserver from Home / Office

Frank_Rizzo

Frank_Rizzo

Frank_Rizzo

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18 Mar 2003
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It's the time of year again where I have to decide to move the server from remote webhoster to local home / office.

What has put me off in the past has been the exhorbitant costs of hosting at home - the cost of a leased line is thousands :(

Anyone know of any good deals out there or an alternative solution?

The current options are dedicated, co-lo, or host at home.
 
That may do as long as the price is right!

Doest SDSL use the existing telelphone wires? Could be a problem there as BT can't upgrade me from 512K. Can't get 1Mb or 2Mb.

What about reliability of SDSL?
 
Hmm, the prices does seem a lot when compared to co-lo.

Currently using a couple of dedicated servers so will be saving by using SDSL but could be saving a lot more with co-lo. e.g. prices around £30-50pm.

If I did go SDSL what would be suitable speed?

The main server gets light to medium traffic peaking around the afternoon. There are probably about 40 users being served at peak.

Would 2Mb be too much? Would 256K be too slow?

What about router? I see Zen have a speedtouch router for £99 why so cheap compared to the Cisco's. What about a firewall?
 
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I can't really understand why you would want to move your server to a home location. The datacentre wins everytime.

There are many decent dedicated providers who will meet your needs. What kind of thing are you looking to do? It sounds like your running some kind of mail server and website.
 
Agreed that there are good datacentres out there but none that I know of in the west country.

Having the server here in the office means that we can upgrade / repair hardware immediately when there is a problem. If a software upgrade / test hangs the server we can reboot instantly etc. It's not easy to do that when 150 miles away.

One reason for not hosting at home used to be because of support. Now that's not an issue anymore but the high cost of a decent connection is. At some stage the need for hosting at home will outweigh the costs.
 
If you rent a dedicated server in London your hardware will be covered for any parts. You will also benefit from the best connectivity and power. Any decent provider will also give you a remote rebootable APC port in which you can power cycle the server in the event of hangs etc.

Its a no brainier for me.

Take a look at www.forum2.co.uk and you'll see a variety of good hosts.
 
But what if you need to do a lot of development on it - upgrade php4 to php5, update mysql, upgrade the cpu, ram, change hard disks etc. There has to come a time where in house outweighs outsourcing :)
 
Frank_Rizzo said:
But what if you need to do a lot of development on it - upgrade php4 to php5, update mysql, upgrade the cpu, ram, change hard disks etc. There has to come a time where in house outweighs outsourcing :)
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Not necessarily. As far as I know (I'm not a server admin, however) all the software can be upgraded remotely through a SSH session. Is it really necessary to swap and switch hardware so much that you have to be right next to the server all the time? Surely you'd be able to make a visit to the data centre if you need to upgrade hardware?

If you intend on running anything mission critical on the server, there's a lot of room for headaches if you plan on hosting it from your home/office. You're going to have to think about connections (Will a single 512Kbps SDSL line really suffice?), back-up power sources and security systems. What happens if a fire breaks out? House your server in a professional data centre and you'll have multi-homed bandwidth, back-up generators, professional-grade security and fire suppression systems.

av. :)
 
I guess we could go on about the pro's and con's of this for weeks :)

Are there any more solutions such as the SDSL route?

Any more info on SDSL - is it reliable, would 512k be unsuitable?

Are leased lines totally out of the question?

That's the information I'm trying to find out guys....
 
Al Vallario said:
Not necessarily. As far as I know (I'm not a server admin, however) all the software can be upgraded remotely through a SSH session. Is it really necessary to swap and switch hardware so much that you have to be right next to the server all the time? Surely you'd be able to make a visit to the data centre if you need to upgrade hardware?
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Correct. I maintain my servers using SSH, even the ones in the data centre at the other side of the building.

As far as swapping hardware goes, I only need to do that once in a blue moon. Depending upon the package you have, can could either go to the data centre or have someone there do the upgrade for you.
 
A leased line will cost you 5 figures and still not have half the connectivity of a server in a DC. A 512k leased line wouldn't be fast enough, you'll have a few users on it and your bandwidth is maxed out. Plus you have the general issues of power cuts and your local bt man breaking the exchange which are a lot less likely to occur at a DC.

I maintain many servers in London (live in Sheffield) and have not once had to go down to change upgrade software it can all be done remotely. As far as the hardware side of things you need to ensure you have a good enough machine to at least last you about year or so (it depends on what you are running). I’m sure an ISP will always have a machine to upgrade you to.
 
Can you see my point that when a business grows there has to be a point where the server moves in house? Turnover grows, you take on more staff. You need the server to be at people's fingertips.

I guess that time is still not right yet. Leased lines are still ridiculously expensive, and SDSL just doesn't cut the mustard. Even though server hardware technology improvements mean that you always get more bang for your buck the same can not be said of communications.

I guess I'll wait another year.

BTW, there are various grants available in some areas to assist businesses with internet connection / IT needs. My local paper ran a feature stating that the local development agency were offering 50% grants to local business for hardware and internet connectivety.

I enquired about moving the server from London to here for the reasons given above (and to indirectly create work locally rather than London) but it was turned down as:

"Unfortunately we are unable to help with grants towards web servers."

Great!
 
We recently had a customer with 4 bonded ADSL lines at their office put a server into co-location because people were complaining that it was slow to access. They had 1mbit up (4x256kbps lines)- and I must admit, when I tested the site, it really did feel slow.

Unless you have a big leased line etc., hosting a company webserver at your premises isn't a good idea really under normal circumstances.
 
We have leased lines.
We are about to move to an 8MB leased line however we've still got no intention of bringing the website in house.
Sure we run all of our own mail etc and one of our FTP sites is hosted at the end of the leased line.
However for perofrmance and sheer reliability then places like Redbus & Docklands in London win every time.
 
Can you see my point that when a business grows there has to be a point where the server moves in house? Turnover grows, you take on more staff. You need the server to be at people's fingertips.
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Not entirely, my company has most of there consumer facing systems located at several locations across the globe, outside of our own premises (would probably put the figure at 85-90%). In the end it just gets too expensive to keep having things in house. For instance getting a additional 90+mbit feed to one of our servers would have cost us quite a lot to have at our premises, but to have at the colocation places, it was fairly cheap (well not cheap........but shed loads cheaper than having a 90mbit line laid), things like changing bandwidth plans are also easier.

I remember about 6-7 years ago, having a 2mbit leased line at our premises, then upgrading it to 8mbit and then more, several times we had to have a new line put in etc, which had long lead times and cost. At datacenters they already have the capacity, and most providers can turn it on almost instantly.

If any our systems are having constant maintanence that they need somebody close to it, then its not really "production/live" ready, and we would class it as still in development/beta and not ready for rollout.
 
Doesn't it also depend on what the server is being used for? Not all scenarios are the same.

Can anyone state what kind of speed would be suitable for 40 max users at a time? What if 512K is indeed suitable?

This is a database server where the reports can be a bit slow but that's due to the server not the bandwidth. Usually reports are served under a second but some of the longer reports 10-15 seconds. It is being upgraded and having it here at our fingertips gives me more confidence.

Yes, it is a live server, yes, it does have new development done on it. The development work is always tested on a spare duplicate before going on the live server. But as is sometimes the case you can test on a spare server until the cows come home. Only when the development stuff is rolled out to the live server could you find real world problems.
 
even with SDSL you still get contention of about 10 to 1 so if you consider during peak times your not going to get the full 512 and sharing whats left between 40 people is not going to be a good idea, we store a lot of stuff in redbuss and would always recomend storing anything thats business critical in a datacentre

taking in account a worst case scenerio if you had a 1mb sdsl and contention was running and its full 10 to 1 with 40 people using the server they would get 2.56kbps each
 
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