I am my Web Host | Hacker News Reader

I am my Web Host

errant.me.uk

14 pointsErrantX12 comments

Note: despite the title, this is not actually about hosting sites on a box out of your basement; it's about VPS hosting. (I was looking forward to seeing what kind of bandwidth he had at his residence and how much it cost...)

Same here.. I actually host my own calendar and file server. I was wondering what kind of bandwidth hit I'd be in for if I hosted my mail and sites too.

It's not so much the amount of bandwidth you need as it is the type of bandwidth and equipment required. You can get cable internet with a 2 mbps uplink speed, but the equipment won't handle the levels of concurrency that you need to serve pages with any reasonable degree of responsiveness. My developers are located in various places around the US, and at various times, we all run dev servers coupled with DynDNS so we can preview what's on someone's dev branch without a push and deploy. Even with fast connections (+2 mbps up) in metro areas (few hops), the serve stats are ridiculously slow. And what about an SLA? Your cable provider doesn't care that your sites are down when your lawn man cuts your cable with his edger. You need a T1 or better with a good router and switching equipment to do it properly.

Couple that with the fact that bandwidth is only part of the equation. How much downtime can you afford? Do you have redundant power? UPS? Generator? What about environment? Do you have sufficient HVAC?

To implement all the required facilities for a server or two is just ridiculously expensive, especially in light of all the quality VPS providers available.

Avoid; we used to do this in our office (set up before my arrival :)) and, of course, if your line went down or slowed then... no email.

We lost some pretty critical mail that way (mad eyes).

What you could do is host a VPS somewhere with a mail server on it and get it to push mail to you when it can reach you (buffering them when unable). This is what we do with some success.

A guy fails at configuring BIND9. News at 11.

I've been wondering if I should get myself a website on a Rackspace cloud, but I'm not sure if I can keep the same static IP if I delete/copy server instances.

I currently have a physical box at home with dynDNS, but it's pretty old (p3 800MHZ, 196MB ram), which is quite a bit slow for my git repositories that I started using for everything, so I'm slowly configuring XEN guest, and for that matter I want to get a proper LDAP & Kerberos setup for authentication. I currently have GIT+SSH/TRACK/APACHE/ and I want to get GIT/GITOSIS/REDMINE/NGINX/DJANGO/whole bunch of other stuff/ with everything authenticating against separate LDAP server.

A guy fails at configuring BIND9. News at 11.

BIND sucks. But seriously I am stil a little concerned about whether Power DNS is secure/per formant. I'm hoping to have some solid data on that soon.

Mostly this is an attempt to prove it is getting easier to do this; with VPS's getting cheaper and more abundant I seriously expect to see "all in one" VM's springing up with more and more people "self hosting". Could even be a viable startup there...

I've been wondering if I should get myself a website on a Rackspace cloud, but I'm not sure if I can keep the same static IP if I delete/copy server instances.

I'm not sure you can on Rackspace - I also would be interested to hear for certain. Same for any other VPS providers. I'm looking for US ones to provide failover/US hosting.

concerned about whether Power DNS is secure/per formant

djbdns is what you're looking for.

Tried to leave a comment on the blog but it wouldnt permit me. If the author sees it here....thanks for the Gandi tip, was looking for a VPS solution that was affordable.

Do you know if they permit you to upload your own VM?

The comments do get throuhg (sometimes). Something destroyed Wordpress on the last update :( must fix it.

r.e. VM's the answer is "no not currently", however it is on their list of things "in development".

Ahh right. Seems Linux is well supported everywhere. But when it comes to Windows reasonably priced solutions are much harder to find.

I have a VM of my own running Windows server that i really wanted to stick on the cloud somewhere. Amazon EC2 works out a little too expensive.

What the hell man; a MySQL backed DNS server which has a PHP web interface? Just learn djbdns already!

http://www.lifewithdjbdns.com/

My favorite resource about this is http://lowendbox.com (I am in no way affiliated with it).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com