Jeremy’s search for a home network storage appliance is very similar to my own, so go give him advice. I’ve also been considering just getting another dedicated server instead, for ~$100 a month I can get a high-bandwidth server with 250+ GB of storage and upgrade it every year. Of course this might not be necessary with home bandwidth going up — I got two offers this month for 10mbps and 25mbps internet connections in my building for under $30 a month, a third of what I just paid to Comcast.
That might be the case Matt, however the reality is that the service you’d receive on a connection with that price is not what you would want at all. You’d no doubt end up calling them saying you were a customer and you’d feel as if they are saying “Sorry Sir, I don’t know you from a bar of soap.” I could be wrong but as a general rule, you do get what you pay for; in that case you aren’t paying much so you can’t expect much either ;\
That sounds like cheaper deal for disk space then any dedicated place that I’ve ever looked at. Where do you host your server at?
I’ve got an old Power Mac G3 as my file server. Put a cheap 120GB Western Digital Drive in (with a ACARD ATA/100 controller), and a 10/100 Mbps Ethernet Card (D-Link).
The machine itself cost $50 (old computer from dad’s work).
Makes a great file server.
Now I can’t wait to get those 10mbps/25mbps connections. Comcast stinks at 4Mbps.
Alistair, the companies offering it are relatively small shops that offer service to just a few buildings in San Francisco, I imagine support would be much more personal than it is with Comcast. My only loyalty to Comcast is my good friend works in their marketing.
Jeff, most of my servers are at The Planet, but they’re a bit expensive for this. You can find cheap deals from WebHostingTalk for older dedicateds with 80GB hard drives starting at 60/mo, and add a big second hard drive for a one-time fee or a monthly increase of about 30/mo. Once you roll in tax and all that it’d probably be over $100, but still pretty low.
Who was offering you those connections? My 55kb/s upload is starting to kill me. I can’t host anything here!
Here’s one of them:
http://vvdcommunications.com/
Wow, those sound like a great deal (the bandwidth to your apartment, that is). I miss running my website from my closet, but I doubt my Comcast service would let me get away with it. I’m looking forward to Verizon’s FIOS coming through Jersey soon, but even then you’re technically not allowed to run servers off it. Will VVD let you?
See also: my internet connection. I’ve got Verizon 15/2MB Fios at home and a server at EV1 for $109.
Dang, nothing out to the sunset yet. When are we going to get that synchronous 100mb line?