We have put an offer on another house. I am trying to figure out what to do about my server. We currently host our mail server and web server at our house. When we sell our house, and move in to the new house, I am thinking that there will be some time before we have the phone line and DSL installed. So I am trying to think of what to do about these servers. I was thinking that there are three options.
- Turn off the servers for the duration of the transition.
- Move the server to a co-location facility
- Move only the mail and web server to a VPS
This kind of makes me think if I want to even run a server from my house anymore. I don't know if it is worth the hassle. The other side of this is that I will be running a server from the house for hosting our music, and sharing files. Since I will be running a server, should I just use it for all of my services?
Congrats on the house! Happy New Year!
ReplyDeleteI "trusted" Speakeasy when they said that the DSL at the new house would be up and running "within 1 week" after I moved in. Boy were they wrong! There's some weird thing where they can't turn on the DSL until some time period after Covad has enabled the lines for DSL. All in all, it ended up taking a month, which was a long month of "is it up yet?" every day. There has to be a better way!
I also looked into coloc facilities. The biggest problem is that in involves building a brand new 1U or 2U server, and then paying for the coloc, and then paying for your home DSL line. Maybe if you assume that your server costs ~$100/mo in electricity alone, tho coloc makes more sense. They were quoting me ~$200-$250/mo for a 2U server.
I think you should just move your machines to a friends house that has a multi-IP DSL line. Use one of the unused IP addresses and a switch, and you can have all your hardware "colocated" not too far away for a few weeks. That will probably be the least painful of all solutions.
I like running my own server, and think it ends up being the most cost effective use of both machines (don't have to buy a special server machine) and network connections (I'm paying for the DSL anyway -- I may as well use it!)