[plug] DIY hosting - worth it?

[Gavin Chester]

On Sun, 2006-10-01 at 13:46 +0800, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> 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!)

Thanks for such a comprehensive reply - you give much food for thought.
I must look into xen some, I wonder if I could manage on a low-spec box
and split it so that it could safely serve as both a firewall and web
server without compromising the integrity of each.  Then I could get
away with using one box instead of two between my private network and
the big, bad world :-)

Gavin.