Why hosting a server at home is not a good idea?
Tags: colocation hosting, hosting at home, One Man Hosting, server at home
Why not host at home? It’s better than colocating your server at a data center and paying a lot of money every month! Is that really true? Let’s find out.
It actually looks much easier to host a server at home than the reality. There are so many factors that goes into managing the availability of a server than you can ever imagine. Let’s look at the most important factors of maintaining the availability of a server and see if you can manage those at your home, all by yourself.
- Power - A server consumes more power than your desktop and most of your home appliances. Leaving your server switched on 24×7 could mean a lot of money in power bills. Not just that, you need UPS, generator etc as well. A data center could be a cheaper alternative when it comes to power.
- Internet - It’s obvious that the server that is used for hosting websites must remain connected to the Internet 24 hours a day. The server will also require connectivity to the Internet that should be reliable and always available. You can not just have one Internet connection and hope it will never go down. You need multiple backups. This alone will cost you a lot of money. A data center usually has multiple connections and you don’t have to worry about backup connections in case one or two goes down.
- Customer support - Let’s talk about supporting your clients. I don’t expect you alone to support your client on 24×7 basis. If you try to run one man hosting company, you will not be able to answer your customer’s queries in timely fashion. If you happen to host your server in a data center, their customer support will usually take care of servers related problems. You, otherwise, will need to hire people to support your home based server.
- Business Model - I will never host my critical site or commerce site on a server that you will host at your home. Why? - I don’t trust your hosting model. It just doesn’t make enough sense when I consider the factors mentioned above. Think about it. Will you host your critical site on a server that somebody is hosting at their home?
Don’t just think from your point of view. Think about the reasons why someone will not want to host their websites on your home based server and you will find more problems to address.
