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Comment by songgao | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one here who thinks that for personal use, owning a server in house is a better choice than using a hosted VPS or server?

It's quite easy to get a decent micro HP server (even with SSD storage) within $1000, which would cost $150.00 - $300.00 a month for a equivalent plan on Linode. Suppose you upgrade your server every two years, the monthly cost of the server is less than $50. You get dedicated CPU time and I/O, permissions to managing everything.

Internet bandwidth might be a problem. But let's put ourselves in the 2 or 3 years future. What if you already have Gigabit Internet like Google Fiber for $70/mo?

And you get other benefits for owning a server in your house. Since it's connected to your home LAN, it can be used to help build a smart home, control smart sensors/cameras, or serve as a media server.

Am I missing something here?

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> Am I missing something here?

You are missing a lot of things.

1. Linode et al buy top-end hardware. It is, generally, going to be more reliable.

2. Linode et al have redundancy in multiple parts of their system. Redundant power, redundant networking, redundant disks, redundancy all over the damn place. A server sitting in a hallway closet does not have these advantages.

3. Finally, you assume that your time is worthless; as in having a $0/hr value.

I charge a lot more than $0/hr for my time. If, in actual fact, I could successfully farm out my little Wordpress blog network to a reliable host who charged a lot more than Linode, I would do so in a heartbeat because it makes financial and hair-pulling sense.

I farm out the management of physical servers to Linode for the same reason. I am nearly 32, my time is expensive, my patience is short and my interest in hardware has long since abated because I have other shit to do. Linode is a bargain from my POV.

If you have fibre to your home and a UPS and are okay dealing with the hardware? sure. You are better off. (cooling, in most places, is unlikely to be a huge deal if you only have one server. You'll cook before the computers will.)

The last mile is a huge problem. If we all get gigabit fibre to the home in a few years? everything will change, and of course, you will be right.

But, here in reality, if you want a network connection with a decent upload speed and decent reliability, you are paying a kilobuck or more a month. 'round here, it's usually $3-$5K/month for 100 to 1000Mbps (Up; you can get 100M down from comcast for like $400, but that's only 10M up.) and this is silicon valley. the place is lousy with dark fiber.

(It's better if you live in Santa Clara or Palo Alto; both places have municipal fiber. But you are still talking tens of kilobucks to get the fiber from the street to your house, and that's if you are very close to the city fiber, and then you've gotta buy bandwidth at a datacenter.)

But yeah, all that said, there are some places with decent last-mile internet; sacramento has had surewest FTTH for far longer than google has. Some areas, Verizon does it. Maybe we will all have it in a few years? It sure would be nice. But I ain't holdin' my breath.

There's quite a bit that you're missing.

Let's start with point #1. You're paying $1000 upfront. With a VPS, you can pay a few bucks per month to get very decent performance (assuming you go with a LEB instead of a overpriced Linode). You assume that you could use your home internet, but the reality of that is that almost every consumer ISP on the face of the earth won't allow customers to run servers. Can you get away with it? Usually, yes. Is it a good idea? Not at all.

Why spend the equivalent of $50/mo? You can get budget dedicated servers for that price range, with a heck of a lot better network resources, and no need to maintain your own hardware.

Really, there's a ridiculously long list of reasons that running any public-facing server from your home is a horrible idea. Take the game server I used to run as an example — I'd be completely and utterly screwed if my home connection was getting 4Gbps DDoS attacks, yet with it being on a remote server, I have options to mitigate it or even ignore it (nullroute, yay).

Edit: There's a ridiculously long list of reasons why home-hosting is bad.

For the things I actually use a personal server for, $150/month is overkill. A server that used to handle my family’s email\* and runs my personal Web site runs just fine on my Linode 512. Heck, if they offered a “256” plan with half the capacity for $9.95/month, I’d be tempted to switch to that.

\* I moved to gmail, not because of cost, but because I got tired of managing the spam filter.

Yes. Your home internet connection is not nearly as reliable as a datacenter's. (Also, you have guests over and the 5 year old unplugs the machine. Your home catches on fire or, worse, you decide to move to another city.)

And then a hurricane hits and you lose power for a week... (this was the event that deterred my super smart plan of hosting in my house years ago)

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