On Wed, 8 Mar 2000, Charles Haight wrote:
> I don't know Pat, but I am a fairly newbie with linux, however, I pay 39.00
> for SWB ADSL and another 20 to texas.net. So I am pretty satisfied with the
> service and cost. Any Comments?
>
Sure. You're talking about a completely different kind of service.
1.
You're not collocating a server, so the machine is sitting in your
house. This can be either good or bad, but in any case
2. Your upstream throughput is only about 384Kb/sec. Since a collocated
server is at the ISP's physical location, your bandwidth is typically
10/100 Mb/sec to the ISP's local net, and is as good as whatever your ISP
has to the Internet. So, for example, if your ISP has a T3 (e.g
Illuminati Online), then you've basically got a T3 (45Mb/sec) connection
to the Internet. The other issue is peering/hop count. By carefully
selecting your ISP, you have some control over what your hop count (the
number of routers between point A and point B) will be. If your ISP has a
good peering arrangement, your hop count will usually be low. SWB seems
to have notoriously high hop counts to almost everywhere, which becomes
painfully obvious when using telnet or ssh. I personally hate it when it
takes 1-2 seconds for each character to appear on the screen when I'm
typing.
What you have (basic ADSL) is suitable for high speed web surfing and/or a
personal home server; it's not suitable IMHO for a general purpose public
web server or development machine to be used by several different people.
I explored the home DSL option, as this is clearly the cheapest way to go,
and decided it wasn't for me. The 384Kb/sec from the server is noticably
slower than a higher speed connection (and will bog down immediately if
you have any sort of hit rate on a web server), and I'm not always home
and like having the convenience of having my machine in a secure facility
where someone is around to do things to it should the need arise.
Finally, a very basic comparison: you're paying $59 for 384,000 bps, and
I'm paying $90 for (theoretically) 10,000,000 bps. Of course one will
never actually get 10Mbs with TCP/IP packets, as far as I know, and I have
a monthly total usage cap, and you don't; but for what I'm doing I'll
probably never get close to my cap, and one CAN get, say, 4Mbs with
TCP/IP, so you're paying 15.36 cents per 1000 bits of bandwidth and I'm
paying 2.25 cents per 1000 bits of bandwidth. Of course this only applies
to traffic coming FROM the machine, but this is what matters for a web
server (as opposed to a web surfer, which is the market home DSL is aimed
at).
Hope this clears up this issue. :-)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Send administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
