[shifuimam]

Boyfriend and I are planning on moving our website content (he's got several sites; I have three) from a couple hosting providers to our local web server. We can get DynDNS registration for $15/year to use our own domains with a dynamic IP (our ISP is Comcast).

However, I discovered today that we can get Comcast Business for $60/moThe downside is that we'll only have 6/1mbps down/up (and no more cable TV, although we don't really care about that), while right now we have 12/4mbps down/up. The plus side is that we get a static IP, and hosting stuff doesn't venture into any gray areas surrounding the Comcast TOS. There's also a slight savings of about $150 a year by going with business over residential service.

So, What Would MacNN Do? Would any of you recommend the business service, or should we stick with residential and wait and see if we get nailed for hosting publicly-accessible content over a residential connection?

[starman]

My friend's husband does this. It's good, but unless you want to manage that crap all the time, I'd advise against it. It's up, it's down, the ISP blows, this isn't working, that's getting hammered. I did that once and after babysitting it for a year or more, I just moved it offsite. Let someone else handle it.

[besson3c]

I think you need to ask more questions other than just questions pertaining to your bandwidth:

- what is your disaster recovery plan?
- what happens in the event that you lose power to your house?
- does a lack of physical security make you liable?
- what redundancies are a part of the network infrastructure of either residential or business service should the primary uplink become unavailable temporarily?
- do you plan to monitor your own services? (if your current service is unmanaged this is a moot point, I guess)
- do you plan to offer SSL protected websites? If so, can you get additional IP addresses for your server(s)?
- what happens when/if the DynDNS services fail?
- do you plan to offer your own mail services? If so, how do you plan to do this with dynamic IPs? Even if you could get your own PTR record many blacklists block netblocks that are registered to residential/dynamic IP space

[shifuimam]

Heh...it's not like we're hosting mission-critical things here. A couple gaming servers (and websites to go along with them), my semi-professional blog site, a friend's site for pet sitting (which isn't even up yet), and the rest of it is just for file storage to host images and whatnot. If something happens to any of the sites, it's really not the end of the world.

Management and stuff is irrelevant - all my stuff is currently on a VPS, so the only thing that I don't have control over is the power to the physical machine the VPS is hosted on. Boyfriend's stuff is currently with Servage, and they have all-too-frequent downtime, it seems. Email is also irrelevant - why host your own mail server when Gmail is free?

I'd like to use SSL, but there's no way in hell I'm spending $300 a year for a cert. If we end up doing SSL, we'll just go with a self-signed cert and people on IE8 who don't know how to deal with the "error" can go fsck themselves.

Either way, we're going to move hosting onsite so we can quit paying other people to host our stuff. The bigger issue is whether or not the drop in upload bandwidth (4mbit vs 1mbit) is significant enough to justify keeping the residential service, or the benefits of the business service outweigh the faults.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by shifuimam 

Heh...it's not like we're hosting mission-critical things here. A couple gaming servers (and websites to go along with them), my semi-professional blog site, a friend's site for pet sitting (which isn't even up yet), and the rest of it is just for file storage to host images and whatnot. If something happens to any of the sites, it's really not the end of the world.

Management and stuff is irrelevant - all my stuff is currently on a VPS, so the only thing that I don't have control over is the power to the physical machine the VPS is hosted on. Boyfriend's stuff is currently with Servage, and they have all-too-frequent downtime, it seems. Email is also irrelevant - why host your own mail server when Gmail is free?

I don't know if the GMail question was a rhetorical question or not, but the main answer to that is to own the mail so that you can back it up, provision new accounts, aliases/redirections, etc.

I'd like to use SSL, but there's no way in hell I'm spending $300 a year for a cert. If we end up doing SSL, we'll just go with a self-signed cert and people on IE8 who don't know how to deal with the "error" can go fsck themselves.

You don't need to pay $300. My clients and myself paid around $70/year or so for a cert with InstantSSL. Resellers can get certs even cheaper.

Either way, we're going to move hosting onsite so we can quit paying other people to host our stuff. The bigger issue is whether or not the drop in upload bandwidth (4mbit vs 1mbit) is significant enough to justify keeping the residential service, or the benefits of the business service outweigh the faults.

This is hard to say without knowing what kind of bandwidth your gaming servers need, as well as file storage if you plan to serve these files outside of your LAN.

[besson3c]

It might also be worthwhile to factor in your electricity costs.

[shifuimam]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

I don't know if the GMail question was a rhetorical question or not, but the main answer to that is to own the mail so that you can back it up, provision new accounts, aliases/redirections, etc.

Trouble is, you can't be certain whatever domain you're using will be around forever. Not that I can be certain that Gmail will be around forever, but it's pretty likely. I have no reason to switch...I already have backups, since I can just use Outlook and copy everything into my local mailbox if I really want to.

You don't need to pay $300. My clients and myself paid around $70/year or so for a cert with InstantSSL. Resellers can get certs even cheaper.

Wat? Really? I was under the impression that if you don't have an SSL cert from one of the big issuers, browsers will throw a hissy fit and some (including, IIRC, IE8) won't even load the page if the certificate authority isn't one of the big ones. Is that not the case with InstantSSL?

At any rate, I don't want to pay for one at all...

This is hard to say without knowing what kind of bandwidth your gaming servers need, as well as file storage if you plan to serve these files outside of your LAN.

Boyfriend is going to do some bandwidth monitoring to see what kind of usage statistics he's getting with his games, and we'll go from there.

[turtle777]

So, besides the meager $ 150 savings, why would you do this switch ?

-t

[exca1ibur]

I pay $7/mo for unlimited webspace/domains/SQL DBs/email addresses/and bandwidth. Much cheaper to host all your sites/forums with a service and just run the gaming server locally with dyndns using the free package. (Most routers have built-in support for dyndns so the free package will work find for a single domain IP.

Cheaper and less maintenance overall for you.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by shifuimam 

Trouble is, you can't be certain whatever domain you're using will be around forever. Not that I can be certain that Gmail will be around forever, but it's pretty likely. I have no reason to switch...I already have backups, since I can just use Outlook and copy everything into my local mailbox if I really want to.

Why not? As long as you keep on registering it it's yours for as long as you want it.

Wat? Really? I was under the impression that if you don't have an SSL cert from one of the big issuers, browsers will throw a hissy fit and some (including, IIRC, IE8) won't even load the page if the certificate authority isn't one of the big ones. Is that not the case with InstantSSL?

InstantSSL is a major issuer, I think they might be a reseller of Thawte. They probably can offer lower costs by offering less insurance liability, but an SSL cert is an SSL cert whether it is self-signed or issued from a vendor such as Thawte/InstantSSL. It is just as likely to "crack" an InstantSSL cert as it is any other cert, i.e. pretty much impossible.

Boyfriend is going to do some bandwidth monitoring to see what kind of usage statistics he's getting with his games, and we'll go from there.

Does he know that he is referred to as "boyfriend"?

[shifuimam]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

InstantSSL is a major issuer, I think they might be a reseller of Thawte. They probably can offer lower costs by offering less insurance liability, but an SSL cert is an SSL cert whether it is self-signed or issued from a vendor such as Thawte/InstantSSL. It is just as likely to "crack" an InstantSSL cert as it is any other cert, i.e. pretty much impossible.

I know that self-signed certs will throw errors, because the certificate authority is not on the list of authorities the browser trusts. At any rate, I'll look into InstantSSL.

Does he know that he is referred to as "boyfriend"?

Dude. He's an NN member, not to mention I tell him everything. Of course he does.

[besson3c]

What is your boyfriend's MacNN name?

*hoping for Abe*

[shifuimam]

Does it matter?