Hello,

I run many sites that use a little bandwidth per month(about 50GB right now). I am amazed at how cheap servers and PCs have gotten in the past few months. Instead of paying 100's of dollars a month for hosting, I am thinking of buying my own servers or PCs, and creating my network in my house and rin my sites on them. I know about co-lo but I m not interested in it. Here are my questions:

1. Does anyone know of any bandwidth providers that offer a bigger transfer rate than DSL and will install it in my house? Anything that is cheap?

2. What would I need to connect all my servers? Would a switch work(could I just plug in my modems ethernet cable into one of the ports on the switch, and all the servers could share the bandwidth)? Or would I need a little router (I heard that these little home routers that linksys offers us aren't the same as a business router, please explain?).

3. I know of cogent, and think it is great, but do you think they would install it in my house? I live in a big part of Houston, Texas. Are there any setup fees?

4. Is there any big difference in a server and a PC if they both have the same HW?

Thanks.

Installing things like this in your house? Wouldn't it go against the Fire Marshall Codes?

T3, DS3, OC3 etc.. are much faster than a DSL line. I'd recommend starting out with a reseller account, better than paying thousands of dollars a month for a lightening fast connection to run through your house. :)

What do you mean by a resleer account?

Wrong forum, pal. :)

Where should I put this?

Originally posted by KyleLC23
Where should I put this?

Technical forum would be my guess. :)

Wow, might I suggest you read up on what your thinking about doing first.

It would be cheaper to rent dedicated servers for a few hundred a month then it would be to get that kind of pipe into your house.

I run many sites that use a little bandwidth per month(about 50GB right now).

And I would not consider a site that uses 50GB/mo of bandwith to be a small site... Thats some pretty high traffic.

Originally posted by Andrax


And I would not consider a site that uses 50GB/mo of bandwith to be a small site... Thats some pretty high traffic.

A few sites, added up

Your right...

What I should have posted was...

I wouldn't consider 50GB/mo bandwith to be "small amount of usage"

If your going to require that much transfer... thats fairly substantial.

I'd suggest you go with a dedicated server rather than your own hosting. quickly looking at a place like rackshack, you could get a spiffy p4 server for under $150 a month. t3 and other such fast connections can easily cost hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars a month, plus a substantial setup fee. you'd also save yourself all the time it would take to learn how to operate and run a server (it's certainly no easy task) and also all the headaches if something goes wrong. with a dedicated server you get someone to watch it for you 24/7 (for example, what happens if the server goes down while you're sleeping?)

just my 2 cents, but if you do decide to run your own server, make sure you know what you're doing because it's a lot harder than it looks...

1. Does anyone know of any bandwidth providers that offer a bigger transfer rate than DSL and will install it in my house? Anything that is cheap?

You'll find alot of companies can offer more than your standard residential DSL service. But you are not going to get highbandwidth lines for 49.99 a month which is about the cost of average cable/dsl service. Also you would want equal upstream and downstream speeds, Depending how close you are to a CO you might qualify for a DSL line at T1 speeds both up and down. But even that may cost around 300-400 a month. Far as companies providing this.. most telco's and other companies like Verio, Qwest, yipes, cogent etc. You could even check with your local ISP's to see what they offer. You will find a difference in pricing when you tell them its for a business as opposed to normal residential usage. Since you would want some type of SLA.


2. What would I need to connect all my servers? Would a switch work(could I just plug in my modems ethernet cable into one of the ports on the switch, and all the servers could share the bandwidth)? Or would I need a little router (I heard that these little home routers that linksys offers us aren't the same as a business router, please explain?).

Depends how you set everything up.. Those standard routers might not have all the features you require. Also how many IP's does your provider allocate to you. Will you be putting each server online with a public IP or will you mask the servers with private IPs and use a router to point the IPs to the correct server? (Could have this built into a router/firewall maybe?) If you have the IP's, then yes you could just plug the modem into a switch and each PC into the switch that have public IPs and they will work..


3. I know of cogent, and think it is great, but do you think they would install it in my house? I live in a big part of Houston, Texas. Are there any setup fees?

Bandwidth providers will install their lines in your bathroom if you pay them enuff.. The costs will let you know if its worth it or not.


4. Is there any big difference in a server and a PC if they both have the same HW?


Not really. Except i've found that some motherboards that are sold as server boards sometimes have more features and just seem to work better, and handle the normal server loads that most workstations may never see.. I've installed "workstations" as servers and had no problems as far as hardware is concerned.


I'm thinking of running my webhosting out of my home. But i'm planning on installing 1-2 T1's, You will also want to think about some type of battery backups or power generators. And backup solutions etc.. This is more than just buy a server, connect it to your DSL line and poof your a webhost provider..

Pkspawn....

I doubt it would be worth installing any real bandwidth into your house. It would be much cheaper to lease space at a datacenter. What most people don't realize that is typical DSL run into homes is ADSL which means even though it may be 1.5MPS download, the upload (which is what your servers would be serving at) would only be 128k which is only 1-2 concurrent users. That's nothing for a server and you'd never gain any business with that kind of low bandwidth. Running a T1 into your home which would give you true 1.5MPS would cost a few $100/m, in addition to a router for a few $1000, which would probably be more than leasing that or more bandwidth at a data center where they would have the proper connectivity, cooling, power, etc.

Originally posted by KyleLC23
Hello,

3. I know of cogent, and think it is great, but do you think they would install it in my house? I live in a big part of Houston, Texas. Are there any setup fees?


Even if you do convince cogent to install in your house, (you won't, I think they require something like a 10 company commit per building) you're still looking at $3,000/month for a 100MBps line.

You could run a T1 to a company that uses cogent if there are any in your area... but then you're looking at the cost of bandwidth (plus that companies' markup) plus the cost of the T1 (around $500 or so).

Anyway... I think it would be much better for you to colocate or get a ded server from rackshack.