It’s a guilty fantasy that a lot have people have had: running their own dedicated server from their home internet connection. There are many potential advantages that come to mind when considering “cottage industry hosting”. These have to be considered with the many downsides to home-based dedicated servers.
The biggest upside is that you would not have to pay monthly hosting to a dedicated server rental company, you would be only be using more of the internet connection that you already pay for, and can probably recycle an old computer to use as the server.
Before you go up in the attic to search for that old Commodore 64 or start the task of untangling that birds-nest-ball of Ethernet cable, make a telephone call to your internet service provider or have a look at their website and read the Terms of Service. Most ISP’s – usually the cable or telephone company – frown on this behavior.
The bandwidth is probably available. Technically everyone could run a dedicated server from their home. This possibility usually isn’t included in most ISP’s business models, though. At least not the successful ones. Internet bandwidth is not limitless, and unfortunately also is not free. Just like everyone, your ISP pays a monthly fee for their internet connection.
Successful home internet service providers usually base their revenue projections on the fact that most people will probably only use a fraction of their potential monthly bandwidth allotment. If everyone in your neighbourhood was to use all their monthly available connection your Internet Service Provider would have on spend money on purchasing additional bandwidth from their “upstream providers”. It is unfortunate that there is not a bandwidth tree you can plant and pick more as you need it. If you owned a bandwidth tree you wouldn’t need to pay your home internet service provider company for anything. You’d save even more money.
Sadly, the reality is that your ISP probably won’t allow you to run a dedicated server on your basic monthly internet connection. Even if you could sneak by their Terms of Service the fact still remains that the one piece of wire running into your home for you internet connection is a single point of failure. If your home internet connection was ever unavailable your dedicated server would be offline too. The possibility of infrequent temporary outages may seem tolerable if you are a home hobbyist, but if you value always-on reliability for your dedicated servers they will need to have at least two separate connections to the internet. This fantasy is starting to get expensive. That old computer you were planning on recycling for the project isn’t worth the cost of redundant internet connections.
The dedicated servers in the ‘hood fantasy is starting to get extremely expensive.
There are more downsides, too. If you are planning on using an old computer as a dedicated server leave it in the attic if its processor is slower than a Pentium 4. Technicalities keep getting in the way of this fantasy. Technically you could hook up any computer to the internet and call it a dedicated server. Be aware that unless it has at least the power of an Intel Pentium 4 processor in it, that old computer from the attic probably won’t be doing much dedicated-server-type-work for you.
There are many great dedicated server hosting companies that rent dedicated servers together with fast bandwidth for one low monthly price. Most well established professional dedicated server rental companies have much bigger connections to the internet than are offered to home subscribers. Anyone can throw a server in their basement and call themselves a hosting company. Those people are really just home hobbyists running dedicated servers in the ‘hood. Whatcha gonna do ?
The best solution is to rent a dedicated server from a company like PingPipe that can charge you one low monthly fee for both your dedicated server hardware rental bundled together with its internet traffic. Fortunately for the consumer servers have got more powerful over the past few years and have become relatively less expensive, while internet traffic costs have lowered at the same time. The promotion at PingPipe this month features Quad core servers with 10TB traffic.
Dedicated server hosting doesn’t have to be expensive. There are slashed setup fees and Intel Core 2 Duo processor dedicated servers with PingPipe starting at just $89 per month