I’ve been tempted on more than one occassion to host my websites at home, but up until recently there wasn’t a fast enough connection to make it feasible.

Cable is fine for home use, but even their business packages max out at 2Mbit upstream.  I ordered a FIOS package with 20Mbit down / 20Mbit upstream, which will provide plenty of overhead for future bandwidth needs.

In the datacenter, I pay by the Mbit, so I throttle some sites to make sure I don’t get charged over.  I also have been delaying other site services (video and file downloads, game servers) because of the huge bandwidth requirements.  Once I get FIOS installed in the house, then I’ll kick these things into full gear, which will give OCMS a big shot in the arm!

There are some things I have to consider that are actually quite scary.  For one, I have to put the servers in a location where heat can be exhausted, and doesn’t disturb us.  Servers are LOUD, especially several of them in a rack.  I also have to be concerned about heat, because our house doesn’t have central A/C.  What about natural disasters (Seattle has been known to get an earthquake or two)?

The electricity also goes out like clockwork in the winter, and although I’m getting a major UPS for the rack, I’m not sure how any outage will affect the fiber lines.  The fiber box has a battery backup, which should keep the lines up for 8 hours, but it remains to be seen how reliable this will be.  I’m running a business, and I want 99.99999% uptime, just like in a datacenter.

What prompted me to make the sudden move is the rising datacenter costs.  I got a “pretty good” deal from my current datacenter, but the monthly prices would make the average internet user cringe.  Now they want to nearly double that, charge me for electricity, and increase the cost for bandwidth.  They want me to pay $100 per Megabit… so if the average cable internet customer were charged that then they would have $800 bills every month.

Going to another datacenter is also alot of trouble.  Yes, I can strike deals and get sponsorships and other stuff, but in the end it’s really just too much trouble… and if you get behind on the bills then they lock you out of the building, so what’s the point of paying all this money for 24-7 access? 

So anyway, OCMS (and all her sister sites) are getting a major fatpipe upgrade, which hopefully will be in place by the end of July.  I’ll be adding game servers, video downloads, file downloads, and tons of other features.