[plug] DIY hosting - worth it?

[Adrian Chadd]

My 2c,

* Hostaway/Arachnet were very good to me over the years but being bytecharged
  sucks. All it takes is one photo collection to become "memed" (thankyou google
  images) and you suddenly are up for $300.

* Hosting in America/Europe is certainly cheaper, but there's no fast and
  quick access to/from the box in Australia. For the kinds of things I tinker
  with that was important.

* So I built a Xen server, got a few friends in on the arrangement, colocated it
  with a friendly ISP and I'm paying a fixed rate per month for a megabit of
  transit (with unlimited WAIX.) Costs are capped and known, server is local,
  support isn't in a different timezone and I get access to my equipment when
  I want to change things.

Its been reasonably successful over the last few months. All my customers^Wfriends
host DNS/mail/web there and its all relatively low resource/bandwidth/time
consuming. It is a shared arrangement (ie, everyone gets a fair cut of the same
pipe and I keep an eye on how much each person is using) and I'm tempted to open
the offer to others looking for similar hosting.

Xen makes this all quite a bit less painful. About the only suggestion I have is
to stay -right- away from the Redhat FC5 Xen DomU kernels; there's a bug in Xen-3
which the custom FC5 kernels expose and this locks up the xen networking driver.
Other than that its been relatively easy. :)

(And I'm about to buy a US-hosted virtual colo service to offer DNS/MX secondarying
for people using my service. Its again easier than everyone trying to arrange
their own. And backups too. Argh, so much to do just for a fun side project!)




Adrian