What are your experiences with hosting a biz in your own home? Costs? Things to think about? Requirements, etc. I'm looking for your feedback! :)

My local carriers are Sprint, and Verizon, if that matters at all. =P


Is this even in the correct forum? =P

expensive for that matter, line prices vary from state to state and city to city, need to maintain hardware and software, i guess it jus depends on how much your really wanting to spend

What would a estimated cost per month be?

Say you're running one server, with t1 and whatever else you would need.

When I priced T1 lines, I found it would be anywhere from $1000 to $1200 per month.

Well, right now it's just an idea in my head. I don't have an estimated budget as of yet.

I'm mainly looking for details that I should be aware of (hardware reqs, maintanence time, etc) , alongside estimated costs.

For 1000 - 1200 a month you can rent or colocate a server for three months in a very, very, very nice datacenter with an OC-192 connection. So why buy a T1 line?

After TI you need power backup, security etc.
Does not make any sense.

Stick with a datacentre :)

There are pro's and con's but personally, i would prefer a datacentre, and your startup costs would be a hell of a lot cheaper.

T-1 for $500 with free Cisco router, local loop, and setup. I used to do this, but no longer needed it after a while.

I had it for a year with 4 servers and a couple of battery backups.

$500.00 would buy a 1/2 rack and a metric buttload of bandwidth in a reasonable colo.
The network is not your problem, you can go beyond 1.5 MB of bandwidth.

We have a frac T in the office and I absolutely hate it. Routers,UPS, Telcos, address space, DNS, IDS and all that crap for what? 1.5 MB? It's less work maintaining the BGP network and fighting w/ 3 providers.

I like running my own show. I pay $600.00 per T1. I am anal about reliability and dont want anyone to blame for problems but myself, so pay the extra money to do it myself;) There is nothing more frustrating than having a server out and not being able to fix it. And when you call their tech support they give some half backed noise about a route being out;)

If you want to run a NOC in your home make sure you
1)Have a backup generator.
2)Have a commercial UPS or if you cant afford that have one small business UPS for EACH peice of equipment.
3)dont jump for the cheapest backbone. Stick with the big boys like WorldCom or Genuity.
4)Make sure you have some friends or family who know the field. You dont want to have to hire a stranger to work in you basement;)

aNc

A hosting business in general is not good in your home for several reasons.

1. You will spend more money to get all the equipment you need then you would most likely for a year of colo + cost of a machine.
2. You can only bring in so many lines to your house.
3. You will easily run out bandwidth using a t1, since you cannot go any higher then 1.5mbps.
4. You cannot install fiber in your neighboorhood.
5. Why would I buy hosting from your basement, when I can get on a machine in a nice datacenter?

lol if i had a t1, i sure wouldnt use it for hosting. itd be my own personal fast connection :D

I was wanting to run a WISP out of this house since I'm right by a cliff. :p

Also, there is the problem of redundancy. How can you protect yourself against a single local outage on the data side?

A good friend used to have a T1 into their office for company web site, mail, etc. One day, the power company did some serious damage to a local telco circuit and they were off-line for 2 1/2 days waiting for things to get fixed.

I'd think twice before setting up shop at home. I also like that personal level of control, so I'm going co-lo at a local facility where I can have 24x7 physical access to my servers in a real data center.

Good luck...

Hello..Since we like to run our own show as well we have a T1..DNS is being hosted somewhere..The T1 is obviously in a office and power is not a problem since we have generators for the business..Also i prefer to have complete control over the servers..(physically and virtually) so i prefer it that way..As for the cost the only cost we paid starting up was for T1 ($550/month) and bought servers and licenses..but thats just one time deal...As for bandwith we can always add another T1 within hours and more comes to more..can always upgrade to T3..My opinion i prefer having it rather than hosting it somewhere where you have to wait for someone...

;)

thats alot of work....I work as a network admin within a public school system and let me tell you running your own show is cool for the simple fact of messing with the hardware, but really its a big ole mess and upgrading connections (ie going from a t1 to a t3) is a little bit more then flipping a switch.

say you start out with a t1 now...you will quickly need a t3. Once that gets bigger where do you go next? fiber? well thats going to be hard for a few reasons.
A. you cant lay fiber in your neighboorhood.
B. if your office isnt in a office park, you cannot get fiber.
C. No bandwidth provider will lay fiber (usually, some do)
D. Contracting someone to install fiber is really expensive due to the complexitiy of it.

For all those reasons and more, just colocation..less of a headache

Originally posted by neonlexx

say you start out with a t1 now...you will quickly need a t3. Once that gets bigger where do you go next? fiber? well thats going to be hard for a few reasons.
A. you cant lay fiber in your neighboorhood.
B. if your office isnt in a office park, you cannot get fiber.
C. No bandwidth provider will lay fiber (usually, some do)
D. Contracting someone to install fiber is really expensive due to the complexitiy of it.



Maybe if you live in the boonies, you can't get fiber. Otherwise your incumbent telco probably has fiber under most curbs. And it's their job, by tariff, to sell you most services regardless of location - well, you might not like the price or timeframe, though.

Kevin

Well let me tell you how easy it is to upgrade from T1 to T3.

1) Call the company
2) takes two days for them to connect your panel to their fiber lines..

Yeah i do agree the only problem would be the installation...

But things in Los Angeles are fast ;)

Well I think in general the original post was about having a T1 for webhosting in your home...which is generally not a good idea.

And even if its only a cross-connect thats needed, i have seen that take upto 90 days.....

Most residential areas do not have fiber layed, some do, most dont.

It's easy to max out a T1.

Still, if you have a second T1 through a different provider, and you don't need that much bandwidth (read not have too many customers), and you have enough battery power to last until the generator starts, and enough fuel for the generator to power everything for a few days, and a Halon/Inergen fire supression system, and a surveillance system, and raisied floors with redundant cooling systems, then you have a data center at home. The point is the same, we only recommend that you host your customers in a data center. If you have one at home, go right ahead and do it.

You really need to ask yourself at what point it's worth building your own infrastructure instead of relying on someone else's. Especially if you're just starting out. Keep in mind that it's not just about money, it's about the stable quality of service that you can provide to your customers.

I remember saying all of this before, though:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?threadid=68083

bitserve,

I'm sure you are aware of this, but ... your domain, bitserve.com is expired.

Just a friendly reminder :)

T-1's in the Kansas City area go for about $399 a month. If you really like doing everything yourself there's no other way to do it. Just be careful because a T1 won't host any huge sites. And forget about any dedicated servers or colo's. :)

Be careful with T3's/ Alot of older residential areas aren't wired for them so you won't be able to upgrade.

Aaron