Self-hosting vs. Budget hosting - What are the economics?
- by cdonner
My current hosting provider (shared Linux, unlimited domains, < $10 per month, with about 20 sites) has been giving me a lot of grief lately. I am contemplating to just ditch them and repurpose the old Sun V20z that is sitting in my basement rack, and move the hosting in-house, literally. My math goes as follows:
my company pays up to $80 a months for my home internet service, which would cover the upgrade from currently Fios to Comcast business internet with 5 static IPs. So this comes free.
running the server will cost me about $180/year at the current rate of approx. $.2/kWh
my time is free
So, it seems that the my net cost of doing this would be about $80 anually, plus the work that goes into setup and maintenance. I will have to get email hosting somewhere, which I do not want to do myself.
On the other side of the balance sheet, I'd likely get better uptime than my provider based on recent stats, will not get suspended and don't have to spend hours with customer support.
Overall, I am not convinced. Has anybody actually done that? What was your experience, and did it pay off?
