Self-servers, how much bandwidth do you have?

For those of you that host your own site(s), how much bandwidth do you have?

 

Have cut way back as I have a contact who now host large music files for me on a unmetered server.

Only use maybe 40GB/month now on content sites.

 

I used to host on my own 4Mbit/768Kbit adsl - the site uses about 140GB/month and it actually worked ok'ish. I stopped doing it as browsing eventually got a bit slow, even with QoS.

 

didn't understand the question, sorry, I do not host off of a private line

 

Do you mean those of us who have a dedicated server colocated somewhere else, or those of us who host from home?

I don't host from home myself - (a) would overload the DSL, (b) against the TOS, and (c) unreliable...though better than it used to be.

 

I use about 3800 GB per month.

 

I do not run a server from home but have a dedicated server via co-location.
It is a unmetered connection but all my clients only use about total of 90GB a month right now.

Drew.

 

I was asking more for those that host at home. Static IPs still seem just too expensive in my neighbor-hood.

 

I just signed up for DSL at http://www.infoblvd.net. I get a static IP (obviously it is needed for hosting) 3000 down and 384 up. This is all for $49.95 a month. A little pricey but better than Verizon's 3000/768 for $79.95 a month. Also with Verizon you can not run an E-Commerce site. For that you would need to pay $234.95.

InfoBlvd is just a reseller of Verizon's service but it looks to be much better than the http://www.buffnet.com service that I had played around with previously. Perhaps I will upgrade in the future once my sites start getting some real traffic. For now this should be more than sufficent for forums and light graphics.

 

The thing is for $10 a month you can get hosting at a real datacenter, not sure why hosting in you bedroom would even be an option.

A server in your basement isn't hosting in my books...

 

I see what you are saying. However my needs are different. In order to get the full flexibility that I want in order to develop things I need a stand alone server. Having a shared environment is slow and consumes too much of my time doing things via FTP or through existing interfaces.

If I could get a solution like that where I could Remote Desktop in and have free reign for $10, $20 or even $40 a month I would do so.

Keep in mind that I am using Microsoft (Yes I'm sorry) products, not PHP or Linux.

 

The real answer might be in development, not hosting. Why not have a development machine at home (I have a few I use to dev use) Then deploy the sites to a more pro hosting setup.

You need to ask yourself, "What am i doing that is custom and will I have revenue to offset the cost of the custom development."

To keep a good level of hosting in your home you will need bandwidth from 2 sources and battery backups for your machines. Dont forget about getting liscensed software and keeping up with all the security patches.

 

Backups will actually be better than other solutions. I will have automatic VPN to a seperate machine that backs up nightly.

Also I just got a free production copy of Visual Studio and SQL server. All that I need is the OS and I will be golden.

 

I have hosted from home for years.

It's how I launch a bunch of my startup sites before they start getting traffic.

My blog is and has always been on my home server (Dell Poweredge 400sc).

I never have really monitored by bandwidth monthly usage. It's kind of a perk of having a home server to not have to.

But recently I realized that it is nice to know how much you are saving in bandwidth by hosting from home so I added awstats to my server. Only been a week though

 

make sure you read the fine print on the MS liscensing. They have done some changes to SQL liscensing. Some releases actuall count each unique web user as a user, instead of when IIS was the user.


I am curious what functionality you are using that you need a dedicated machine. Interested as I am a .NET developer myself and am always interested with what others are using.

 

On one server I use like 400gb while my other 250gb. My package has 1000gb for each server.

 

The first thing that comes to mind are services. You can't create your own. Secondly, backups. You can not do SQL Server backups in a hosted environment. You can also through security into there. If you are working locally, there is no FTP'ing to intercept. Also all of your passwords are more private. A major portion is SQL Server hosting as well. To get a hosted 1gig database it is way more than $10 a month. Also if you host your own you have full control to roll it back to anypoint in time.

There are more but those where the random ones that popped to mind.

 

I have to say though, the next version of IIS is going to make hosted options more popular. They are seperating each directory and the web.config is going to act kind of like an .htaccess file. One of MS's next big pushes is going to be to get a higher percentage of small time web masters. They finally realize that these same people who have personal websites also make up a large portion of the enterprise developers.

 

I rent a dedicated server now, all the pleasures of hosting at home, without the need to worry about bandwidth and UPS.

All backups and transfers are done via scp so no cleartext passwords are sent.

 

Try for 3 dollars a month you can get a half a terrabyte of low latency transfer at a real data center.

I self host most of my domains off a 1.5/768 line at home, several pr3's and a couple pr4's. I never see any lag caused by the web servers. I pay 89 bucks a month for 4 static ip's. I sure wouldn't do it for just the web servers as 69 bucks a month will get a dedicated p4 server that someone else pays the electricity on and 2 terabytes of transfer. I do it because it is convenient and because I want to, not because it makes financial sense. Us computer geeks need something to amuse us.