[Gllug] Hiring servers - uk2.net

[tet at accucard.com]

>Are we getting to the time when high bandwidth connections will be easy
>(and cheap) to get anywhere so you could just stick a server in your
>front room and rent your own personal connection?
>And thus co-location will diminish in popularity?

Bandwidth isn't usually the only reason for colo, although it's sometimes
one of them. We have a 100Mb/s to the office, yet we still host our servers
at a colo site. Why? Redundancy, mostly. They offer two independent network
feeds into the building. They supply two independent power feeds into our
racks, each on a huge (and I mean *huge*) UPS. They're prepared to guarantee,
as part of our contract, 24x7 power and internet feed into our racks with no
more than (IIRC) 5 hours total downtime a year, with financial penalties if
they don't meet that.

Yes, we could host everything in the office, but we'd lose out on all of
that (unless we're prepared to spend vast wedges of cash -- and for now,
at least, colo is cheaper).

That said, for non-business related stuff, yes, doing it yourself is an
option. My DSL is more than capable of providing enough bandwidth for
most things I'd want to do at home, for example. And if it reaches a
point where it isn't, then SDSL almost certainly is. But by then you're
back to the same conclusion -- colo is cheaper.

Tet

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