Last December, I made a decision to start becoming more self-reliant and not utilizing free online services as much. To accomplish that, I moved my blog off of WordPress and onto my own hosted server. This year, it looks like I’m going to go a step further and be completely on my own. It’s a huge risk, but it comes with some benefits I just can’t afford any other way.
At one time, I had my email hosted through some web hosting provider. It was ok, but I didn’t have a lot of the flexibility I wanted. And at that time, I also had a simple web site hosted at the same provider. I made the radical decision to change from a simple hosting plan to a virtual server. The virtual server would let me install anything I wanted on it. I installed a mail server. I installed a web server. And later, I installed WordPress and things have been going pretty smoothly.
What were my risks back then? Mostly hacking worries. But, I’ve been pretty good. I had one instance where the mail server got compromised due to my lack of cleanup of development accounts, but otherwise, no issues.
The consideration this year is to bring the entire server from the virtual to the physical and keep it not in a massive data center, but in my house. By many accounts, this is a pretty bad idea.
To start, a data center has massive bandwidth and multiple, redundant internet connections. The downtime is going to be minimal at best. unnoticeable in reality. Second, the server hardware is going to be highly redundant and isn’t going to go down either. The server is virtual. If the hardware fails, it just activates on new hardware. And you don’t have to worry about it. No hard drive failures (they’re part of a massive drive pool), no power supply failures, no UPS failures. No worries about patches (they’re automatically applied). Why would I give that up?
What am I sacrificing for this security and reliability? Well, I’m locked into a specific server. It has a fixed CPU, fixed RAM, and fixed hard drive size (and I just noticed today, fixed bandwidth). Those are listed in increasing importance to me. Right now, I have a project that I want to take public. My current hosted server has 2GB of RAM and 60GB of drive space total. That also includes the operating system. The project I want to release has a data size of 1.5TB and is constantly growing. I can’t even get a virtual server with that amount of space. I would have to have a dedicated server, which would run over $500/mo. And I would have to fully manage it – remotely. Hard drive failure? Call someone in CA to visit the data center and swap the drive. It’s not reasonable. So again, my plan is to bring the server into my house, where I can maintain it and upgrade it as needed and it can serve the world.
Today, I called Frontier and asked about their Business line of FIOS products. After all, this is going to be a hosted server. This is not a residential setup (although I could kind of get away with it using dynamic DNS, which is hokey AF). I had some questions and I got some answers and the answers seem to indicate that I am going to be able to do this.
First question, do you have to be a business to get Business FIOS? Yes. Ok. So I have to set up an LLC for myself. I’ve been through this before. I don’t exactly like it, but maybe it’s for the best. Maybe I’ll start doing consulting again.
Last question, how much does it cost? This is important, because Frontier’s website only shows the promotional prices. $50/mo for 100mbps and $90/mo for 500mbps. And the numbers for what they call month-to-month aren’t that bad. I’m focusing on 500mbps and that’s going to run around $125/mo.
Is $125/mo a lot? Considering some people pay that much so they can have all the cable channels with sports and movies, I don’t think so. Is it a lot for me? It would be, except… I pay $75/mo for my 100mbps FIOS now. I pay $480/yr for my virtual server. Add all that up and do some math and that’s $115/mo I’m paying for my internet needs. An extra $10/mo to get 500mbps and full control of a server where I can have TB’s of data online? I think it’s a fair deal.
My hosting will expire 11/4, so I have a couple of months to get prepped for the change. I need to buy another server and set it up. I need to make some more improvements to my project. I need to plan to change my DNS. Migrate my mail, export and reimport my WordPress stuff. It would be a busy week or so of work.
And once that’s done, I’ll be completely on my own. And what’s the scariest part of that? If my internet goes down, or I move, or I die (well, if I die, it’s my survivor’s problem), there’s no more email. That is a critical service that I should think hard about. But again, I can’t get the features I want without self-hosting it. The old saying, hope for the best, plan for the worst means you have to always think about the worst. That’s hard.
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