Hi

I am involved in a project for a company that has a server that is hosted by another company. Co location or server hosting as you call it.

I have been asked to investigate the possibility of hosting the server themselves. I have spoken to numerous telecoms companies but cant get a straight answer.

If they want to have their web server in house and offset some costs by hosting other sites and possibly servers - how could they begin.

I have been quoted for 64k, 128kand 256k lines managed and connected directly to the internet. But nobody can tell me how these lines relate to bandwidth in gb per month, no of servers and no of sites.

for instance what line would be ok for 2 servers, each with 25 sites and 10gb of 10 gb of bandwith per month total. Thes are sample figures to give me some idea.

As I said this is exploratory so excuse me if I havent supplied enough information or am not clear. Please ask any further questions you need.

Thanks

256k is far too slow unless it's kbytes/second, in which case it's still damn slow, let me show you how to work things out. I'll use for example, my ADSL connection at home.

My download rate is capped at 60kbytes per second, we need to know gigs per month, so:

60x60 = 3600 kbytes per minute
x60 = 216000 kbytes per hour / 211 megabytes per hour
x24 = 5064 megabytes per day / 5 gigabytes per day
x30 = 148 gigabytes a month.

Therefore I can download 148 gigabytes per month, which is more than enough for 14 "10 gig" hosting accounts, but the point i'm making is, they'll never be able to get more than 60k/s :)


If you want to begin in-house datacentering, you'll need the following
1. Filtered smoothed power
2. Backup power facilities
3. Fully switched and controlled network
4. Internet connection that's FAST (several megabit a second absolute minimum, i'd say at least 20)
5. Support department

If they believe they can start up a service like this you may wish to think about it, but the comms lines will have to be faster than 256k

The biggest problem for you would be the high traffic hours..

Winkie said "4. Internet connection that's FAST (several megabit a second absolute minimum, i'd say at least 20)"

Thats crap. You think you need 20mbit line to host websites?!

Thats WAY overkill, unless you plan on running a 24/7 operation with a few hundred co-located and dedicated boxes.. But as far as shared webhosting, and mabe a server or two, I suggest look at ATLEAST a fract t1 (512k) or a full (1536k) line for starters, then work your way up the b.w wagon as your company needs to..

Originally posted by mattschinkel
The biggest problem for you would be the high traffic hours.. I would agree. I think Winkie is taking into consideration that an in-house datacenter can't burst like you can at a modern Datacenter. If you don't have the pipe, you can grind to a halt. On the other hand I know of many smaller companies that use a pair of T-1's for their corporate servers and have no real issues.

The downside I see to your scenario is security. Turning a Corporate server into a shared hosting machine is like opening the doors to the general public and inviting them in. I don't know many businesses that would feel real comfortable doing this....

Indeed, my point was he was talking about hosting shared websites and possibly some servers, now I don't know about you but I will not host with anyone that can burst to the amazingly high speed of 2 meg a second, hell some of my clients have faster internet connections than that and i'm not joking.