Options for hosting servers in my basement?

[Joshua Judson Rosen]

Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> writes:
>
> On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 3:48 PM, Joshua Judson Rosen
> <rozzin at geekspace.com> wrote:
> >     * A fast enough *uplink*
>
>   Define "fast enough".

Well, let's say four StatusNet sites peered with 20 other sites,
and with a dozen active users spread between the four local sites.
Plus e-mail for my domain, and my wife's domain, and a few others
(so, count the cost of dealing with inbound spam); online photo-albums
for sharing with my and my wife's families; downloads for a small
but quasi-popular FOSS project (from the rest of the world's perspective--
these are *uploads* for me); plus some other, low-traffic services
that should remain speedy (like SSH and jabber).

The StatusNet sites are hosted on Linode, right now, which gives me
some nice graphs that show me needing something like 1 kb/s for that
(which means that my consumer-grade service would probably be
sufficient if not for the reliability being in the toilet),
but the rest of the services are on Slicehost which doesn't tell me
anything useful about resource-utilisation over time (which, I guess,
is yet another reason to move all of that stuff over to Linode,
if I keep it in the cloud...; but you can see why the `just sign up
for a VPS with Linode!' answers aren't what I'm looking for).

I guess I'm not talking about a Really Big or Really Busy site.
My biggest (technical) issue, right now, is that I'm blowing
my *memory* allotment from Linode, and I'd rather just pay once
to set-up a real server with more RAM than I'll ever need
than pay an extra $100 per month to /rent/ the RAM.

There are other considerations that push me toward `in my basement'
rather than a colocation facility; some are technical or pragmatic,
others aren't.

> >     * Something that won't empty my wallet ...
>
>   Specify your budget.  We know $300/month is too high for you.  Is
> $200/month good?  $100?  $50?  $10?

If I'm looking at replacing my existing consumer Internet service at home,
plus both of my VPS services, which total something like $100/month,
then $100/month for the new setup would be a go.

>   I can say that GNHLUG has received excellent service from G4
> Communications in Manchester (http://www.g4.net/).  They offer co-lo,
> hosting, and premises feeds.

Hm. I sent an e-mail inquiry to them a week ago, and haven't
seen a response yet. I'll have to follow up with a phone call,
on Monday.

> > Or is home server-hosting a completely ridiculous idea
> > in our modern world?
>
>   As others have pointed out, it may not be very cost-effective.
> Aside from the feed, you also have to consider power, cooling (and its
> power), power redundancy (initial and maintenance), physical space,
> noise, and the computer hardware.  Depending on what you want to do,
> it likely just isn't worth it.

Cooling and power may actually not be big concerns--my basement's
got plenty of plenty of ambient cool for the sort of server I'm
looking at hosting (c10k?); my *house* seems to be close enough
to invulnerable to power-outages that I'm not concerned by it,
so it's more a question of how vulnerable the link to the ISP is.

There are also other considerations beyond those--like who has
physical access to my data-stores; and, as someone asked
on Slashdot the other day, how easy it is for the people
in my Will to take over if I die in a car-wreck or something:

   http://ask.slashdot.org/story/12/07/07/1348205/ask-slashdot-how-do-you-securely-store-private-information-for-posterity

-- 
"Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))."