Hi all,

It is great to find a place on the web with so many people who know their stuff. Keep up the good work all! I hope that in time I can make a worthwhile contribution here too.

Anyway, can someone please clarify something for me. My company and I are considering going with a leased line and housing our own servers on which we would then sell hosting. We have until now been reselling shared hosting and most of our hosted accounts are those we have included as part of a site design / development package. We currently host 20 domains and our heaviest bandwidth user consumes a maximum of just 3Gb per month.

I have been looking at what is on offer and most companies quote prices for bandwidth connections starting at 64Kb/s. Am I right in saying that this equates to about 20Gb per month or have I got the calculations all wrong? If I have gone wrong, could you please help me to get it right? :D

I will welcome and be grateful for any thoughts / recommendations on who to deal with and things to watch out for. We are a UK based company, so please bear that in mind if you are recommending a provider!

Thanks.

Yes, 20gb is about right, check out this url:

http://tera-byte.com/ded.html

Thanks JDF.

So is it accurate to say that having a leased line with 256 Kb/s bandwidth, and a decent server (or servers) is the same as (or is as good as) renting a dedicated server from a company and paying for 80Gb bandwidth per month?

Or am I looking at this too simplistically? :confused:

Originally posted by kraygerson

So is it accurate to say that having a leased line with 256 Kb/s bandwidth, and a decent server (or servers) is the same as (or is as good as) renting a dedicated server from a company and paying for 80Gb bandwidth per month?


Not really. Your website does not use bandwidth at an evenly distributed manner. Most likely your site/sites get more hits during the day than at night, and probably next to none overnight.

If you pay for 80 gigs of transfer, as long as your host does not cap your line at 256kb, then you will have access to more bandwdith when you need it. With a 256k line you are limited to 256k period, even during your peak access times.

Well, not really. Not at all actually. Hosting companies as I'm sure you know have very large pipes to the internet which means no matter how many people are hitting sites on their servers, the content is going to be delivered and in a timely fashion where as a 256kb pipe is filled to the max when as little as 1 person is surfing a site on your server (someone w/ cable or dsl). 5 people w/ 56k would max out your upload throughput and if anymore want in the bandwidth is split up even further. There's also the advantages of backup power, administration, security, etc when you host with someone who's servers are in an actual data center. All in all, it doesn't make very much sense to host anything more then a single personal site on a DSL line. You'd be much better off renting rackspace at a co-lo facility or leasing a dedicated server somewhere, especially with the competetive pricing Rackshack has forced on the industry.

Thanks uuallan.

Yes, of course. It's obvious now. :homer:

So would you say that a T1 would be about the minimum required to host and operate a reasonable number of sites without mega slowdown at peak times?

Is there anyone in the same position who is successfully using anything less than a T1?

You see, the joys of being UK based mean that we are looking at paying a minimum of £9500 per year for a T1. (Figure includes our beloved VAT) This does not compare too favourably with some of the prices I have seen quoted on the forums that are offered by US based providers!

At the size your company is at, I don't think that getting a leased line and housing your own server would be the best route to take. The expenses building and running your own NOC most likely cannot be justified by the revenue that you are currently taking in.

Consider the expenses: 1) leased line. In the US for a 256K pipe you are looking at a fractional T1. The last time I priced a fractional T1 (about a year ago), the prices ranged from $400 - $2000/month which did not include leasing equipment (router) and did not include the price of the local loop ($'s for the wires from the ISP's facility or SONET or whatever to your facility). I'm in the US and I'm pretty sure that prices in the UK are higher for leased lines of all sorts. 2) physical facility. You will need to build or lease space for your servers, other equipment, and offices. Again I'm guessing but I think that $1000/mo is in the low to middle range for a two room office, NOT in a new building or in a central Downtown area. You will also need to have equipment that all reliable and professional NOC's have including security systems, AC systems, and deisel generator backups just to start with. Many thousands of dollars to do it right, even for just a few servers. 4) staff. Maybe you already have a staff, but someone should really be there to tend to the servers 24/hrs per day. 5) redundancy. One fractional T1 is really not enough. For redundancy you should have a second line from a different provider (at best, double your costs for bandwidth). Also, consider what would happen if you get a customer which has a successful website and uses up all of your 256k line. You now have a slow service with connection problems. You will have to get a new line which can take weeks or months for your provider to get to you. In the mean time you are losing customers and cannot get any new ones.

You can go on the cheap with your NOC and get a single fractional T1 and one or two servers, and keep in in your basement or garage with no backups or AC or anything else. Your expenses will still be somewhere in the range of $400 - $1000 per month and still have all the problems of not having the right stuff to go with it.

The alternative, and natural progression of someone in your position, would be to lease a dedicated server or colocate your own server in an existing professionally managed NOC. You can lease a relatively high powered dedicated server from $100 to $400 per month with more bandwidth than you need. On top of it, if you choose your provider right, your server will have everything it needs to be reliable and always (or almost always) available to your customers. The same goes for colocating except that you will ship them your own servers and it is generally cheaper per server over leasing dedicated.

Keep in mind that I am not trying to bash you or your business plan. There is a difference between leasing a line and a dedicated server, and I do think that you should heavily research your dedicated server options before you dive in. Best of luck!

AP

Wow...You guys snuck in 3 posts while I was typing mine. My words/minute must be woefully slow.

AP

AP,

Not for one second did I take any of that the wrong way. Thanks for the advice.

To give you some idea, we are up and running, we are revenue generating and we do already have relevant expertise in house. (Me? Well I'm primarily a developer! I dabble though)

This is an expansion plan far from set in stone. We are weighing up the options at the moment. In fact that is why I thought I'd bounce the leased line off a few people here first.

I am glad I did.

If anyone else has more advice / suggestions I'd appreciate them!

Local Loop is usually what jacks up the price for an in house T1 line.
Best to check if your provider has to go through a local telephone company's local loop or not.

Not sure if it's just the UK where the pricing is scandallous, but I lease a dedicated server overseas and was interested in the costs of doing this in house in the UK by having my own leased line.

I don't live in a cabled area, so no broadband. So it seemed like a nice idea - nice fast leased line providing net access and the ability to host my own stuff.

The server costs me around £300 per month to lease. Broadband e.g. a cable modem would cost £20 a month.

However, a leased line quote for a 512MB line was £4000 set up fee and £11,000 per year. Add to this licensing and hardware costs and it stacks up further.

I'd need to be hosting a lot more sites for it to be economical. But then I'd need a faster line = more cash so back to being uneconomic.

Broadband is a necessity for me and it's my fault I didn't check the address was cabled before I moved in. So I've weighed the options and it is actually cheaper to move house to a cabled area, pay for broadband access, and keep the leased server.

It may well just be rip off Britain at work :-)

Thanks for all the replies and advice given. We are almost certainly going for dedicated servers or possibly even colocation first.

The hunt is on for the provider who can offer the best all round deal!