Hacker News Reader

Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

Their unlinkable TOS says no servers.

Can you run Torrent server, Minecraft server, Counter strike server, Web server for your blog, Web server for your micro business that uses 0.1 MByte/s - 2MByte/s upload?

I can do all those things on my 10USD/month 20/20 mbit home net in Poland.

Fair enough. But P2P applications can take the brunt of the load and you can run your API on Firebase or something. I look forward to innovation. I also would think that the boundary between server and P2P might start to blur, given sufficient saturation of such possibilities around the world.

This seems to the ToS element you mention: http://support.google.com/fiber/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...

REALLY? Because I was just seriously considering moving to KC until I read that sentence. If the legal agreement says no servers, then what is the point? What is the point of moving your startup to KC if you technically aren't allowed to run a business off of Google Fiber?

From the FAQ: "For businesses located in qualified fiberhoods, we plan to introduce a small business offering shortly". If you're seriously interested I'd give them a call and get more details on the exact timeline.

What home ISP allows you to run a server? "Business class" is always required for that sort of thing.

That said, few startups should be hosting their own servers, no matter the speed of their internet connection. Everything else you do will be blazing fast though.

I've run servers off residential IPs before. I use to maintain a community box for me and a bunch of friends when I lived with my parents. It wasn't fast but it met our needs. The only problems I ever ran into with the ISP was when I tried to run a mail server.

Optimum Online, on their Boost package

Productivity of your crew, mostly. Serving a consumer or b2b website is probably not something you're going to want to do out of a house any time soon. Google Fiber isn't redundant, it doesn't give you better RW security or route around any of the other problems of enterprise-grade hosting. It's just FAST internet.

> Serving a consumer or b2b website is probably not something you're going to want to do out of a house any time soon.

I always thought this was primarily because of bandwidth and scale issues. Removing the bandwidth issue leaves the scale issue, and that's just a matter of how far you're willing to go in your own home, isn't it?

Your home isn't nearly as reliable as a data center, not to mention the lack of elasticity compared to the cloud.

Why would you run your startup's servers from your residential ISP?

This whole thing is an experiment by Google to see how people will use the Internet in the future, when people can actually get gigabit/s connections. I think the point is to see how end users use it, not to host a lot of content.

I think that's the wrong view, though. Maybe what happens when people get that much bandwidth is, they will naturally start running more servers!

That is sort of a catchall to say that they can cut off any node that causes trouble. Not to say it is a great idea to run a CDN from your house, but they aren't trying to crush everyone like Comcast does to people on home contracts -- there is no more expensive business tier Google wants to push you up to.

It seems like a lot of risk to base your business on the proposition that Google probably won't enforce their TOS.

It's no more unreasonable than running a business off any other ISP's residential/consumer service. Google says in their FAQ that if you want to run a business off their service, contact them directly - the service they're advertising isn't for you.

Nobody's talking about moving to another city to take advantage of another ISP's residential/consumer service as a business decision.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com