[Nottingham] Hosting your own domain/s?

[Robert Davies]

On Monday 07 Jul 2003 20:34, Kus wrote:

> Rock solid for 10 months. 4 hrs of downtime. Totally happy with ntl as a
> server pipe. The only issue is upload. I only get 128k upload, which means
> its useless for games.
>
> But we only host muds and ftp/irc so its all good. We use QOS kernel level
> packet priorities to keep it bearable and reduce lag. Usually people ftp
> all day, all night a-la-kazaa. Super pipes are nice, but if you just plan
> ahead and say, "hmm, I'd like to watch that maybe tomorrow night." you can

This is the sort of thing, which degrades service to others in your 
neighbourhood, due to the limmitted upload capacity.  NTL ought to monitor 
this kind of usage at peak times, rather than the ham fisted 1GB per day no 
more than 3 days in 14 download rule, which ignores whether the traffic was 
avoiding evenings when the service is heavily loaded.

Co-located servers are available at reasonable cost, last time I looked 
£30/month, which would become minimal if a LUG group clubbed together, and 
used it as a fallback mail server, personal websites and other low-traffic 
applications.  The main drawback for the kind of usage you have, is that the 
ftp traffic might eat into the monthly bandwidth allocations and incur 
additional charges.

A few years back, it was possible to do a deal with a local ISP, and locate a 
server with them, without traffic limitations as they could balance out the 
downloads (saturated) with uploads where the links were under utilised.  It 
might still be feasible to come to an arrangement, though there's been a lot 
of consolidation and the big boys don't care about such small niches in the 
market.

If many start using dynamic DNS for ftp, web and other 24/7 servers it's 
likely restrictions shall be imposed, as service quality degrades to the 
normal home user.  Unfortunately it's always easier to make sweeping absolute  
bans, than it is to selectively target those causing the congestion, analysis 
time costs money, whereas total bar on ftp or http service would be cheap to 
enforce.

Rob