[sf-lug] Astound ISP Hosting Webserver

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Justin Ryan (justizin at vongogo.org):

> You really want a static IP, and Speakeasy, though they charge a good
> bit more than AT&T, at least does not charge extra for the switch to
> "business service".
> 
> Honestly, however, for less than the cost of a speakeasy account, you
> can get a vm at slicehost.com with four virtual cores and a gig of ram
> that will serve your site much, much faster.  Then you can use
> Comcast, which I've found a good bit faster at my location, and
> doesn't have to be reliable enough to run my customer sites.
> 
> Surely many of us know the joys of running a setup at home, but the
> truth is, it doesn't make sense - not for your business, your
> visitors, or the environment.

FWIW, I've always run servers at home, and found the tradeoff balance to
my liking.

"Home" used to be 744 Harrison Street, SF (the CoffeeNet building),
which had two T1 lines through The Little Garden^W^W^W Best Internet^W^W
Verio.  Lately, it's been at my old family house in west Menlo Park, sadly 
at roughly maximal aDSL distance from the telco central office -- but,
on the bright side I've had the pleasure of dealing with Raw Bandwidth
Communications, which is an excellent company[1].  (My family previously
used Northpoint SDSL, until that firm folded.)

Nominal downstream rate is 384kbps to 1.5Mbps, which lately has 
rate-adapted to 928 kilobytes/sec (about  but can often do higher.  

Nominal upstream is 128-384Kbps, lately able to hit the top of that
range.  

And it's all been highly reliable, and more than fast enough (when my
local shell users aren't doing dumb things that draw unplanned large
hits of traffic).


Also FWIW, *I* would not put up with port-blocking of the sort described
for Astound, and would vote with my feet.  (There are ISPs that block
spam/malware-ridden ports, e.g., tcp/25, by default but unblock them
upon request.  I could live with that.)

[1] http://www.rawbandwidth.com/services/resdsl.html