Thinking of hosting myself instead of 1&1, is it worth it?

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mikecLA

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 20, 2011
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Right now I am paying approx. $400/mo for a dedicated box with 1&1. Specs are:
Windows Server 2003
Quad AMD 2216 HE (4 cpus, 2.39G)
Areca ARC-1110 Raid Card & 500Gig Drive
8 Gig Ram

They claim bandwidth is 100M/sec, up & down, however when I remote connect to the server and run a speedtest, I'm getting an average of 2.6 up&down (also varies depending on when I do it, but it's never over 5 each way).

Since this box has been up for about 4 years and newer stuff is available, I gave them a call to see if they would chop my price down and was told no, but I can get a 6 CPU Phenom Black 3.3 box, 16 Gig Ram, 1.5 TB hard drive for the same price.

However, I would have to move everything from one box to the other, and I'm just wondering if I'm better off building my own server that I would pay for once and getting an EoC 5M up & down dedicated connection for about the same fee they are charging for hosting. Would be faster and I can always upgrade my connection speed and/or the box anytime I wanted. I would also probably build a Xeon box and not AMD.

Thoughts? Should I stick with them or go my own route?
 
Up to you man. You can get way cheaper dedicated (managed or unmanaged) servers elsewhere. You could also buy/build your own server and colocate it for roughly $100.00 a month. Probably not cost effective, but you get to pick out the specs and hardware yourself, whereas most dedicated servers you don't.

Have a look around on the Webhostingtalk Forums for Colocated and Dedicated Servers.
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=36
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=131

If you think a VPS would be enough speed, you could go that route too. Save you even more money.
 
Its upto you man really what you have to think about is electric cost and plus getting a static IP from your ISP if you can get it.

I host my own mail,spam box, webserver at my apt with a static IP from the ISP.
 
I would say it depends largely on what you are hosting and what your own connection is if when you say hosting yourself hosting it at home.
 
timreichhart said:
Its upto you man really what you have to think about is electric cost and plus getting a static IP from your ISP if you can get it.

I host my own mail,spam box, webserver at my apt with a static IP from the ISP.
Click to expand...

I do the same with a dynamic IP. Use zoneedit for the dyn IP DNS, and use a smart host for sending email without being blocked as spam.
 
If I were to host it, it would be in my office. I would get an Ethernet over Copper dedicated connection, 5/5 or higher. The added benefit to doing so would be an upgrade in my existing office connection, which right now is DSL through AT&T (3/768). My connection is fast enough for right now without a dedicated server, but if I were to hire more employees I would need an upgrade on the connection just for the VoIP phone system alone, which is part of the reason I was thinking of moving the server.

Co-Location for $100/mo does not seem like a bad idea either. I'm in LA and so is quadranet, so that might be something to look into.

I have a quad-xeon X3430 sitting here doing nothing (I was going to use it for the asterisk phone system but found out I can easily get by on an older box that was also doing nothing) so I may play around with it and see how it goes.
 
timreichhart said:
Its upto you man really what you have to think about is electric cost and plus getting a static IP from your ISP if you can get it.

I host my own mail,spam box, webserver at my apt with a static IP from the ISP.
Click to expand...

Electric in my building is free (actually it's part of my monthly fixed CAM charge on the lease), so everything runs 24/7 without concern.

Static IP -- that would be solved as soon as I upgraded the connection. I would not think about hosting a dedicated box on an AT&T DSL line. It gets too much traffic.
 
does your office have power backup incase something goes down... how reliable is the ISP, would you have backup if they go down, how critical is uptime for this server
 
MrGuvernment said:
does your office have power backup incase something goes down... how reliable is the ISP, would you have backup if they go down, how critical is uptime for this server
Click to expand...

Server is Mission critical, must be up all the time, but 3 years in this office, and the power has only gone down once for a few minutes. My regular UPS was enough to keep the desktop PC running until power came back on. Who knows though, I'm in an earthquake prone area and that could be an issue one of these days.

ISP -- I have no idea. I would have to get the connection installed and use it for a few months before plopping a dedicated server on it. I may have to do this anyway if I end up outgrowing the existing DSL connection. The max upload I can get on AT&T DSL is 768kb/sec, which is okay for myself and 1 employee, but if I were to expand my outgoing call center operation and use the existing VoIP system (which I would definitely do) I need more bandwidth anyway.
 
It's cheaper in the long run, if you have the bandwidth to do it, go for it. Also easier to manage, and you can grow the servers as big as you want without additional monthly cost. (power is cheap compared to alternatives)
 
In the end, you're probably better off in a Data center. Redundant power, redundant internet connection, etc...

How is Cable/phone/power delivered to your building now? Pole or underground? What happens if some drunk/bluehair hits the pole and rips down those services? That's not just a quick call to some call center somewhere.
 
mikecLA said:
If I were to host it, it would be in my office. I would get an Ethernet over Copper dedicated connection, 5/5 or higher. The added benefit to doing so would be an upgrade in my existing office connection, which right now is DSL through AT&T (3/768). My connection is fast enough for right now without a dedicated server, but if I were to hire more employees I would need an upgrade on the connection just for the VoIP phone system alone, which is part of the reason I was thinking of moving the server.

Co-Location for $100/mo does not seem like a bad idea either. I'm in LA and so is quadranet, so that might be something to look into.

I have a quad-xeon X3430 sitting here doing nothing (I was going to use it for the asterisk phone system but found out I can easily get by on an older box that was also doing nothing) so I may play around with it and see how it goes.
Click to expand...

What voip system are you using? With asterisk you can use as little as 8kbit/s up for a single phone with the right codec. the 768 would be fine for at LEAST 50 phones assuming you did some sort of QOS.
 
MrGuvernment said:
does your office have power backup incase something goes down... how reliable is the ISP, would you have backup if they go down, how critical is uptime for this server
Click to expand...

To add to this, does your server hold any data that is PCI, HIPAA, SEC, etc compliant? If so does the rest of your internal network meet these standards? For power not only do you have UPS that has a minimum of a 3 minute run time, but also generators? What is their run time? What are your fuel contracts, how fast can fuel get there, and how long can it keep coming? What is your ISP's uptime SLA? Depending on that will you get a 2nd ISP, and what is their SLA? Are you going to build yourself a HA firewall LB cluster to ensure that a single gateway failure will not take out your network? What do you have for fire suppression as well as HVAC? What about monitoring, not just server and network, but also ambient temperature power draw, fire, intrusion, etc?

For your hardware what are your maintenance contracts? If you have a failure in a critical component how long before it gets replaced? What is the redundancy in your environment, both people and hardware, what is the one person or component that if removed from the environment it comes to a complete halt?

These are all things you have to consider when hosting yourself in your own datacenter. Now Colo-ing can solve a lot of these issues for you, but you are still left with some problems (such as once they bring that drop to your rack, you are responsible for everything else). My company has decided to go to a colo approach because we can build enough redundancy into our network, however given our location and facility HVAC, fire suppression, and ISP options we found that we weren't able to meet our requirements for our network certification.
 
C7J0yc3 said:
To add to this, does your server hold any data that is PCI, HIPAA, SEC, etc compliant? If so does the rest of your internal network meet these standards? For power not only do you have UPS that has a minimum of a 3 minute run time, but also generators? What is their run time? What are your fuel contracts, how fast can fuel get there, and how long can it keep coming? What is your ISP's uptime SLA? Depending on that will you get a 2nd ISP, and what is their SLA? Are you going to build yourself a HA firewall LB cluster to ensure that a single gateway failure will not take out your network? What do you have for fire suppression as well as HVAC? What about monitoring, not just server and network, but also ambient temperature power draw, fire, intrusion, etc?

For your hardware what are your maintenance contracts? If you have a failure in a critical component how long before it gets replaced? What is the redundancy in your environment, both people and hardware, what is the one person or component that if removed from the environment it comes to a complete halt?

These are all things you have to consider when hosting yourself in your own datacenter. Now Colo-ing can solve a lot of these issues for you, but you are still left with some problems (such as once they bring that drop to your rack, you are responsible for everything else). My company has decided to go to a colo approach because we can build enough redundancy into our network, however given our location and facility HVAC, fire suppression, and ISP options we found that we weren't able to meet our requirements for our network certification.
Click to expand...

Based on all of this and the fact that I would rather spend my time marketing my business than doing IT work, I'm sticking with 1&1.

I will "play" with setting up a second box and cloning it for development and sandbox work, but I'm going to keep the production stuff on 1&1 until things grow to the point where I need an IT person full-time.

Thanks for all the replies and making me think deep about this.
 
anytime, many people tend to over look the real important details like uptime and redundancy, i would bet once you moved everything to your office, something would go down.... or during the move something would crash and burn, it always happens!
 
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