Why more startups aren't doing this?<p>I'm all done with slow disk on cloud hosts. I have no budget to pay for a colo or a dedicated host. I'm planning on building a server with commodity components and an Intel SSD. I figure I can build a server with a quad core AMD chip, an Intel SSD and extra memory and Disks I have lying around for about $500.<p>A Comcast Business Broadband package gets me 22 Mbps/5 Mbps for $100 a month. Double that for 50Mbps/10Mbps.<p>I don't need 5 nines of reliability. I'm willing to deal with a couple of hours of down time in an emergency while we're getting off the ground.<p>Why aren't more startups doing this? I understand that you might want to buy decent "enterprise" hardware at some point if your site takes off. But, hardware is dirt cheap compared to the crap offerings you get on cloud hosts. Am I missing something?
Over an year this costs you about $1200 for bandwidth + $500 for hardware + electricity/service. Let's say an even $1600 or ~ $135 / month.<p>$135 / month buys you two 1.5GB Linode instances or one 2GB Slicehost instance (I use Slicehost but they seem to be much more expensive compared to Linode).<p>The reason I see renting VPSs, especially at the beginning, as a smart thing is that you are postponing the actual hardware costs towards a later time, when you are (presumably) profitable. And if you decide to cancel the whole thing, it's just a matter of shutting down the instances and that's it. It just seems much more convenient.<p>Now, if you already have the hardware and you trust the electricity/bandwidth provider you could self-host. But investing time and money in hardware and self-hosting might just be the one thing that stops you from doing the right job software-wise. (Of course, unless your service depends precisely on the fine-tuned hardware that you might manage yourself, but I don't think you are in this situation -- it's just a cost discussion).
It's fine until your garage burns down / floods, or someone digs through your street's connection.<p>Those things are unlikely, but even with a backup you're going to have pretty horrendous amounts of downtime. You could lessen the impact by having some off-site secondary system ready to go at any moment, but then at that point you might as well be renting a server.
Probably the startups that do something like this, don't really talk about it.<p>The negative replies here are one reason. Competitive advantage may be another.<p>Personal example: I had a dedicated rackspace server for about $650/month. I was doing basic web hosting, but also streaming video via Flash Media Server.<p>Now the video server and web server need not be on the same physical hardware. No more than 50 users simultaneously stream video. However, bandwidth overages pushed that monthly fee to over $1600 several months ago (and that was only two weeks into the month).<p>So, I switched from rackspace to some commodity php/mysql all-you-can eat webhost. I then set up additional video servers on Verizon Fios Business package, with a 35/35Mbps connection.<p>Now the video is not crucial to the success of the website, more like icing on the cake, so some downtime is acceptable in my case.<p>However, I do have a UPS that can run the server for approx. 14 minutes underload, which is enough time for me to manually switch to a backup generator.<p>Of course, I had all these things already (UPS,generator).<p>For me, it was a no-brainer. $150/month with 5 fixed IPs and I provide my own physical hardware PLUS unlimited bandwidth, versus $650/month.<p>The momey saved can be spent on hardware or software. As traffic increases beyond the capabilities of the Fios connection, I may consider rackspace again.<p>OTOH, I have several buddies that would be willing to colocate additional hardware at their FIOS enabled locations.<p>It simply depends on your needs.<p>Be careful with Comcast business, though. I believe they have some pricey install fees for business accounts, unless you sign a 3-year contract.<p>BTW, it is not in the garage, it is in a sideroom w/ it's own unit AC.
$100/mo? That's $40/mo. more than I charge for 1U of real datacenter space with a 5Mbps (shared) connection. Plus, if you actually start generating a lot of traffic I'm not going to randomly cut you off or throttle your connection like Comcast might.
It's been a few years, but I used to do some webhosting from my house on "business class" cable. It wasn't that much of a sysadmin task once I had things set up. But what killed us was our connection's downtime. I think over a year we were disconnected at least 5 times that we noticed, from a couple hours to a 2 day stretch over one weekend.<p>One tip: if you're not a cable TV customer (just data), when they connect you, see if you can get the tech to physically label your connection in the junction box out at the street with something like "Business Broadband Customer". We were disconnected at least twice by random Larry the cable guys working on neighbors' stuff. He'd see us connected, but we wouldn't show up as a cable TV subscriber so he'd disconnect us. After the second time, I got our guy (same company, but different division) to label our connection and it stayed connected. That solved our longer outages, but we still had shorter ones.
Way back in 2007 I launched my first successful Facebook app on a shared server from asmallorange.com that cost me $3 a month. Said Facebook app was making $50 a day when it outgrew that "server". I upgraded to a dedicated server with Softlayer that cost $400 a month. Said app was generating $3k a day in ad rev when it outgrew that server. Also I'm not some rockstar coder. Back in those days I didn't even know to index the join columns in MySQL. Had I done that I could have squeezed more traffic through one box. After this experience Ive decided that the majority of web apps can be launched for free.
Because you are in the software business, not the hosting business.<p>Over the long run, a hosting company should be able to keep your website up and running "in less time", "higher quality", and "cheaper" than you can.<p>If your business can host websites more efficiently and effectively than a hosting firm, maybe you are in the wrong business and should become a hosting company for other firms?
I'm always baffled by this question. What on earth gives anyone the perception that data services are only about a connection and a server? How many concurrent TCP/IP sessions do you think that "free" Comcast cable router will support? I can guarantee you that you can overrun it's capabilities with even a single dedicated server. You might have a few spare UPSs lying around, but what about HVAC? What are you going to do when a squirrel blows the only circuit servicing your home? Sure, your servers and connection might stay up, but how long can you run without overheating? When you enumerate the things that data centers have, and your garage does not, I can't see how it makes any sense.<p>* Redundant electricity/generators
* Real HVAC systems (also on generators)
* Fire suppression systems
* Redundant connectivity
* Connections that can handle high levels of concurrency
* Secure facility<p>Never underestimate the impact of downtime to your business' viability. At any given moment, your service will be "critical" to someone. Often times, the loss of confidence can't be regained, and to be brutally honest, that loss of confidence would be justified given that you think it's ok to run your hosting out of a garage.<p>Given how small the cost delta is between hosting infrastructure at your home versus paying for something like a VPS, you're assigning a very small value to your customer's importance. As a customer, how am I supposed to feel about that? That is probably the single greatest reason more startups aren't doing this. You have to fight and claw for every customer you get. I'm not willing to have them walk out the door because I decided I could save $70/month on hosting by doing it from my garage. If you can't sustain the hosting costs required to run your business today, you won't be able to do it six months from now. Time to reassess your model.
I did it for my company. Except replace garage with basement. I have a business ISP account with a dedicated staff rep. and 24/7 on-site repair. It costs just at $77 a month for 10/5 with 5 static IPs.<p>I purchased an older HP Proliant server off eBay with 12 drives for just under $600 shipped for everything. I installed VMWare ESXi on the machine and then created 5 virtual machines. One machine for an email server, one for database server, one for web, and two staging machines for database/web server. Total cost for those machines was zero, and thanks to virtual appliances I can expand.<p>At that point I have redundant power supplies, raid hard drives, and plenty of backup swaps. I also can configure the server whenever to allocate resources as needed to the machines running. I can quickly copy and create a new server whenever I need one, which is really nifty.<p>In the end the only down-time I have is when my power is totally out. If I host I usually have about a 97% up-time excluding regular maintenance. The machine running constantly makes less impact than my Dell XPS 720.
What users notice most is latency, not bandwidth.<p>For example, if every page asset has an extra 1 second latency, then you are adding several seconds to your base page load time as all those 1 second delays stack up. First the main frame has to load, then if you have a subframe, the subframe has to load, then finally the content in it. Nest frames or other content, and suddenly your site seems sluggish for a single user and you're nowhere near your bandwidth limit.<p>I've had Fios and Comcast and on both latency wasn't great. Latency on their networks varies widely by location and is harder to keep consistent and build a good marketing message around, so they don't sell on latency.
there is no sense to plan for scaling when you are small.<p>you are wasting valuable resources for things that might not happen. Just spend $10/mo on a shared host and you'll be good to go.<p>if your product is in such a high demand, that it crashes from the traffic...then you can quickly spend a few bucks on a dedicated server. Until then preparing for millions of users is just stupid, since chances are, you'll only get a few hundred users that first week/month
I've done this before when testing out micro business ideas, and if they take off then I get a more professional hosting setup.<p>Like you I build a fast box myself from parts and made sure I had a good broadband provider with consistent upstream speeds.<p>If you're idea's successful, you'll soon know about it.
While hosting anything that's too serious in your garage probably isn't a great idea- I've hosted stuff at non-traditional places before and been just fine. Nothing of ours is mission critical that I'm doing this with.<p>We've got a rack at a local university that's in a large (8x10) closet with its own power, HVAC and fire suppression. The facility is fairly secure and you'd have to know two layers of door codes to get in there.<p>Yet we've got 6 servers in a rack. The servers in total cost us around $3000 (could have done it for less, but one of them we bought new and went overkill on), and we pay nothing for monthly hosting.<p>If you sniff around local universities, you can likely find someone that is cool with you throwing something in their rack for free or cheap. I know many of the dorms at MIT have several 42U racks on each floor and people throw stuff in those all the time. I know of others that have cheap hosting for affiliated members.<p>Time to call your alma mater?
Fire and thieves do happen (seen a couple of times at customers who were hosting their servers themselves, unfortunately).<p>It's an option though if in your context, you could tolerate a week (not a couple of days) of downtime, and buy everything again!<p>Oh - and energy/piece of mind is I believe the scarcest resource for an entrepreneur, too :)
I host my sites on a server in my living room.<p>I use my HTPC at home as a server for my SVN and sites which haven't started making money for me yet. What I like about this setup is that I can deploy large amounts of data in an instant. I have a mostly static site with a few million pages I plan to update daily.<p>More importantly, now I can justify paying for the fast internet connection and keeping the PC running 24hrs.<p>The problem area is keeping backups. My server is a retired P4 I got from ebay for $50, which is not really reliable. I had to go through the pain of setting up all my backup scripts, which I guess I would have to do any way.<p>The P4 has enough processing power to handle all my sites' traffic while I'm watching youtube on it.<p>I also use the server to download anything and everything I need. It also serves as a file server and hosts some of my personal ssh tunnels and proxies.<p>Having said that, I would recommend using a home server unless you really don't want to spend money on hosting or if you are worried about bandwidth caps. Start ups can benefit from a home server, but plan to movie it to a real server once you start growing. Don't invest on home server hardware or try to upgrade. What you already have is probably good enough.
Yes, but I have an audience of at most twelve.<p>However, while I use extremely cheap hardware (i build a server for about $300 retail quantity one), the power supplies will fail. The time that they choose to fail will not be in alignment with your choice of time to fail. If you live in an area subject to power failures, you are down if it lasts longer than say 30 minutes. If someone in your neighborhood sucks too much bandwidth, it is likely to pull from your allotment. If your lawnmower or the neighbor's lawnmower cuts the cable, who knows how long it will take to fix.<p>I have several UPS units essentially for transient protection, and two or three internet providers (cable plus dsl) and a verizon cellular internet access.<p>If I were looking for users in the hundreds or thousands or more, I would certainly go for a low-cost provider with a good stack. These are not that expensive and I hear that many do an excellent job.
You could also just rent the smallest server at hetzner.de for 59 EUR/mo and have them add a 128G SSD for 44 EUR/mo.<p>That way you pay 103 EUR/mo (about 134 USD) and skip a lot of headache.
The reason is because it doesn't scale, and you will end up spending most of your time managing the server stack rather than deploying and selling the product.
We have a couple of servers at the office handling various duties like file serving, staging environment, backup email and support website in case our data center goes down. We used to run a few sites on them before we migrated to fully dedicated hosting.<p>It's not necessarily a bad idea, but I'd probably not do it again now that cheap VPSes are a commodity. Outsourcing the physical management allows me to not worry about assembling hardware, backups, power outages, network outages, burglary, fire and flooding. Neither will the server leave users hanging every time someone on the network downloads alot of data.<p>Unless you're doing some serious processing, a cheap Linode VPS should hold you over until you're profitable enough to upgrade to some real hosting.
I'm done with slow disk on cloud hosts. But actually the one with slow disk was Slicehost, and I AM fed up to hell with that. They caused me no end of problems until I figured out they were the problem. It's a bit deceptive, really, since you're promised your fair share of resources - then it turns out you're disk i/o is as low as 3/mb a sec. W T F.<p>Instead of going nuts and hosting in my garage, though... I just changed hosts. A rack on a colo would make more sense than the garage route, too.
Downtime doesn't sound so bad when your site is relatively unknown... What happens when your fortunate enough to get your first piece of good press that directs a flood of traffic to your site? Seems to me that's when downtime is most likely to happen, and when you'd have preferred to pay professionals to prepare you for it.
Im confused. I figured the new best way, with the insanely cheap prices was the cloud. It saves you redeploying in the cloud later. Need more CPU, RAM, etc, click a button, clone a server.<p>Looking into Amazon even, their prices are fractions of a penny on bandwidth. And I see reddit dump all their servers, drop employee load, and it seems the home garage is rad for testing, but maybe not that great, as one day, if it all works out, you have to retool for the cloud anyway.<p>P.S. I am doing hosting of non critical stuff myself on a Comcast 50/10 line which is really 60/15, on a few mac mini's, which use near no power, and seem to stay up pretty well. I am just toting around with my personally ideas mostly. I like the fast local lan access, and I jump to a VPN so I can feel it like the rest of the world would. But it is only temp, until the idea proves viable, and then off to the cloud I go.
I have an unused dell pentium 4 box running my website at my parents house :D<p>It just hosts an info site and blog for my android app on a pretty basic wordpress site that I have backed up. It's also a nice dev/filehost server. I figure I'll deal with scaling if I ever get to it.<p>The most visitors I've ever had is maybe 50 a day and who knows how many of those are robots. I wouldn't want to run any extensive server side code or an actual web app on it though.
Gcan get a root server for €50 upwards (eg. at <a href="http://hetzner.de" rel="nofollow">http://hetzner.de</a>). They have great hardware, a 100MBps connection and a couple of TB data transfer included.<p>See also <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1564897" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1564897</a>
why oh why people does not look around for dedicated host price before going into that much trouble ?<p>see this for example <a href="http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/ks/" rel="nofollow">http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/ks/</a> (note: I don't work for OVH)<p>that's about 25$/month, look at the specs for yourself.<p>the pros:
* if the hardware go down in flame they replace it. period.
* a nice choice of distrib (Linux / BSD / Solaris / Windows)
* the f<i>cking bandwidth (agreed it would be mainly fast for europe)<p>the cons:
</i> you will have to do the admin yourself (for the lower prices), and that can take time depending on what you need/do.
* after using this you will find any broadband offer awfully slow
* you will not be able to live without a dedicated server ;)<p>I'm not trying to be negative here, but this kind of hosting is much cheaper than hosting the hardware yourself.
i would argue that if you are only spending $500 on hardware (I'm assuming 8GiB ram there?) you are right on the borderline of co-lo vs vps.<p>you can get reasonable co-lo for a hundred bucks a month, and ridiculous amounts of bandwidth for two hundred bucks.<p>also, total up your power costs for the server. the thing is California charges you more the more you use; your top marginal KwH can be pretty expensive, especially if you live with other people.
Its too early for you to need to scale, but it seems to me that a service like App Engine eliminates:<p>1- The cost. Right off the bat you're spending $1,700 that would probably cost you nothing if you hosted it with google.<p>2- The administration time - why spend any time configuring or administering servers? It doesn't benefit the product when you get this essentially for free.<p>3- The concerns about security, reliability, single point of failure issues, etc. These may not be critical now, but eventually they will be important and that means you'll have to move. Why not start on App Engine where this is taken care of?<p>4- Scalability. Again, not something you need now, but rather than re-architect your site and move it later, why not use App Engine from the beginning?<p>From my perspective, App Engine is such a compelling value proposition that there's no reason not to build your site there. If google somehow becomes untenable, you can host app engine sites on unix using open source software.... and the appengine SDK is open sourced itself. So you're not locked in, other than the "lockin" of providing free service until you get big and a great platform.