I've constantly toyed with the idea of hosting my own web servers from my house, but have bumped up against the huge price tag for T1 lines, especially in more rural areas of Calvert where I live.

I was just wondering if anyone has a T1 in their house and about what they are paying for the service (and who they get the line from). Is it worth it do you think? I'm paying about $700 a month in leased servers in data centers, but have always wanted to have them here at home under my own control instead of spending money to 'rent' machines elsewhere.

IMHO I think you are better off doing what you are currently doing.

-More reliable service/bandwidth at a data center. They most likely have fiber run to the data center with service level agreements (service down for X amount of time you get X amount off the bill) and the like. They will get service restored before you would; if they were to drop service at all.

-Servers get slower and older every day. Let the data center keep them up to date with the latest and greatest.

-Power issues. You will need to condition and protect your power, back up power, maybe a generator when power fails and so on. Higher electric bills running servers, extra cooling if needed, etc.

T1's aren't that fast so depending on how much bandwidth you are using it may not be enough

Going on my 12th year at Verizon, MCI before that..

I agree with MarylandMask...renting is a more cost effective.

Regarding your statement about $700 per month for servers, I suggest you do some shopping around.

I've constantly toyed with the idea of hosting my own web servers from my house, but have bumped up against the huge price tag for T1 lines, especially in more rural areas of Calvert where I live.

I was just wondering if anyone has a T1 in their house and about what they are paying for the service (and who they get the line from). Is it worth it do you think? I'm paying about $700 a month in leased servers in data centers, but have always wanted to have them here at home under my own control instead of spending money to 'rent' machines elsewhere.



Ya know here is Ft Washington, My Comcast has only gone out a couple times in 6 yrs we have had it .... with a good router, Dynamic DNS and a DSL line for back up ....

you could probably run it from your house ....

what are you running on your servers ?


Edit: and it is not necessarily the cost of the T-1 as the cost of the "Last Mile"

I could have gotten a T-1 for $ 400 ... but the last mile was another $ 250


:mad:

Just chiming in with the other folks...

$700/month may or may not be a lot... depends on what you get.

There are some good points above. A T-1 ain't a heck of a lot of bandwidth; you'll get a lot more in a decent data center. A good data center will give you true diversity, with fiber runs to different Central Offices. Then you can buy IP from different networks (ATT, Verizon, Sprint, Quest, etc.). Keep in mind that a real data center (at least the ones we used to build) will have a couple (if not more) of OC-48s out to the Internet. They can slice off as much bandwidth as you need and do it cheaper than the LEC can pull copper out to your house.

Power is another good point. A good data center will have diverse power lines so one cut or transformer failure won't take 'em down.

Don't know where you're hosting now. The Equinix data center over by Dulles is a thing of beauty, but not cheap. Experis has a nice facility out in Middletown, VA. Switch & Data used to have a reasonable colo place in Tysons. There's a reasonable place in Laurel (I forget the name). Sprint used to sell colo at the switch site in Relay (near BWI); dunno if it's still available, but its' sitting on gobs of fiber there!

Beyond the cost of the T1 you have to consider hardware cost, software cost/maintenance subscriptions, backup capabilities, power and other environmental issues (A/C, humidity, etc.) - in the long run it is cheaper to lease server space unless you are willing to run a full data center.

In the end, I know I'll be convinced by the rational statements here and talk myself out of doing it (I've talked myself out of doing it several dozen times). I was just more curious if anyone else was actually doing it and what issues (and more importantly price) they were dealing with. I just think it would be neat.

My biggest concern is not necessarily the hardware (I have tons of servers I've picked up over the years in auctions and other fun toys) but reliability. We have about five > 2 hour power outages annually here in my part of the Beach and two outages > 20 hours (last year was really bad, though the year before was only 1 outage). I would definitely have to set up some sort of generator and switchover system. I do worry a bit about bandwidth, and was actually considered what I guess is technically called a 'bonded T1' which can be 2x-10x faster than a T1 (or something like that). Prices for that started around $2,000 a month though. The T1 quotes I got a few months ago were around $800 a month for my location (I'm a tad far from the CO in Owings).

I currently rent three servers, a web, database, and testing server for a few websites that handle about 1 to 1.5 million uniques a month. I also farm off some of the static files (mainly images) to the cloud (mosso or Amazon S3). I do occasionally shop around, but generally stay with my provider (Datapipe) as their customer support has been pretty good. I use other quotes to negotiate from time to time to get lower prices (last year I was paying about $1,300 a month, so $700 is a nice savings).

Thanks for all the comments.