There are a ton of reasons to keep this stuff in house, the best of which is "you get really good bandwidth for the office." Followed closely by "It's cheap" :) However, going through all of that work still leaves you vulnerable to over or underbuying bandwith, and reliability issues. Generally, if you can go with either a co-lo or a hosted solution, you will save money and headache. When choosing, you will want to look at facilities AND homing, that is how well connected to the internet is your datacenter/ISP. If your ISP has to go to SLC to go to Denver to catch the backbone, that's two extra hops., and hops are generally bad. <WARNING>Here comes a plug (no pun intended)</WARNING>
We (globalservers.com) have a shared solution that looks dedicated. We have awsome bandwidth and protection from floods,etc. You get root and for all intents and purposes it looks like a dedicated box without the headaches. And for what you get, it's MUCH more economical than trying to run a farm over DSL. Finally, we're really well homed, with excellent connections to the backbone in Los Angeles.
Allright, plug off... Whatever you do, hosting it yourself is cheap but not reliable, and as reliablility increases, so does cost and the relationship is hyperbolic - it takes an order of magnitude more money for each increase in reliability. My advice is let somebody else spend the money and figure out how to share so you're only paying a small part of the total cost. Good Luck.
-Peter
Eric Jensen wrote:
Going to be launching a business management system and we are going to host the web sites instead of distribute our code base. This is where my knowledge gets pretty sparse. We would really like to run our own servers from our location isntead of colocate. I looked at a few ISPs and what they offer for DSL lines with a static IP and have not been impressed. For $150-200 a month you can get a 384kb/s line that is, according to them, perfect for web hosting. That just doesn't make sense to me. When most users now days have closer to 1.5mb DSL (at around $30-40 a month mind you) how could you support even 10 hits at a time and not get complaints about it being too slow? We were thinking of getting one line with a static IP and then a bunch of 1.5mb standard lines and merging them. We think that will work fine for download, but not upload since we would go out on a different IP. Seems like it would really screw up DNS, amongst other things I'm sure. So what are our options if we want to keep the equipment in-house? Am I missing something with these 384-ish DSL lines designed for small-medium businesses?
Eric Jensen .===================================. | This has been a P.L.U.G. mailing. | | Don't Fear the Penguin. | | IRC: #utah at irc.freenode.net | `==================================='
.===================================. | This has been a P.L.U.G. mailing. | | Don't Fear the Penguin. | | IRC: #utah at irc.freenode.net | `==================================='
