[sllug-members]: Host my own, or pay someone?

[Adam Barrett]

Chad,

I went down this path recently too. Different hosting options,
different needs, basic same problem.

The conclusion I had was based on uptime. Obviously you will want to
have a guarantee that your site is going to be up, and stay up.

Erase any notions you have about Comcast and any memory you have about
downtime. They are an on-demand service. Which means there is lag, and
possible outage. They offer NO QoS at all. Not even on the workplace
account. If it goes down there is no failsafe, there is nothing to
help you stay in business.

Hosting through Xmission will supply you with the backbone, a QoS, and
uptime that is great.

Talk to the boys at Xmission about what you can and can't do to the
server. You mention one of your concerns is storage space, think
realistically about what you will be using the storage for on the
server. Don't mix you business with your pleasure (ie, music storage).
Keep the business end of this deal, business. If you really need the
750GB for storage, well then I would think your site is a little
heavy, but more power to you.

Personally for business, I would go with Xmission (or other host) to
make sure that my site will always be available to the end user, cause
they dont care if it is hosted in your basement or in a warehouse,
they just want to get to the site.

BTW - Site looks good, I need to take a longer look!

On 5/31/06, Chad <masterclc at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello there linux fans!
>
> I'm about 2 inches away from my 'go live' for my business (shameless
> plug http://www.pauselivetv.com ).  Right now it's being hosted on a
> residential dynamic Comcast IP (my home linux server).  By the time
> it's actual Go Live day hits I'd like to have it hosted correctly, on
> a Commercial IP.
>
> So, I'm looking at hosting providers and Commercial ISP's.  I've not
> completely decided upon these 2, but this is what I've narrowed down
> to in my browsing:
> Comcast Workplace vs Xmission
>
> Here's my problem, and hopefully you great folks can help me with deciding:
>
> I have Comcast as my home ISP, and pay ~60/month for the internet and
> extremely basic analog cable TV.  That's ~4mb/sec down and ~384kb/sec
> up.  Comcast workplace will give me a static IP, ~6mb/sec down and
> ~768/sec up, no port restrictions (though I don't have any with my
> residential either), email blah, and other blah (the blah are things
> that are of very little interest to me).   All at ~$110/month.  If I
> went this route I'd drop my residential line, and use the Workplace
> account for my home internet; meaning I'd see a new output of ~$50
> additional bucks a month.
> The benefit of this option:
> I host my own.  I can do pretty much anything I want with my server,
> including extremely niceties such as NFS'ing image directories, and
> MUCH MUCH more.  I have pretty much the world as my oyster as far as
> what my server includes; and what seems very important to me is
> basically unlimited storage (currently capped at 750GB, due to my HD
> sizes ;) ) and unlimited bandwidth.
>
> My other option:
> Minimum account I'd even consider at Xmission costs me ~$50/month.
> Obviously bandwidth far exceeds that of what I'd have piped into my
> house as Xmission would host it on their >450mb/sec connection.  I'm
> not sure how limited I'd be with what I can do with the server, but
> I'm fairly sure it wouldn't be as easily tweaked as my own home server
> (it's a decent IBM eServer P4 series), at least not for the $50
> package.  I do get their excellent supply of geek knowledge!  And if I
> keep my residential Comcast service, and add this, I'm at ~$110/month
> here too; so money washes out if I go with the $50/month hosting
> package at Xmission.
>
> So, in the end, anyone have any responses on which one to go with and
> why?  Or even better, another option to throw into the mix?
>
> I linked to the site at the beginning of this message, so hopefully
> you can see what I need and see what the site requirements might match
> with (with other hosting providers and such); but, basically I need at
> least 2 mysql db's, Apache with PHP enabled, >/=PHP 4.x, ~300mb
> storage (for now), and if possible a SSL cert.
>
> Any ideas?  If I'm not clear on something, please ask, I'll be happy to clarify.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Chad
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-- 
Adam Barrett
dragen at gmail.com