[aclug-L] Re: High-speed server access

[Carl D Cravens <raven@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 27 Dec 1999, Dale W Hodge wrote:

> running it for myself. I can see where offering services to others could
> cause a bit more work. What issues do you see affecting long-term
> reliability?

The person doing it for free.  He has very little stake in the
matter... it's one thing to run a free service which other people
subscribe to for their personal use (a mailing list) but it's quite
another to run a service on which other people are going to provide
services.  And what if he decides to move?  I can picture this service
having downtime involving relocating when the "host" moves, whether he
keeps it or turns it over to someone else.  
 
> You are right, there an upside/downside to any of the possible
> implementations.  Though as long as it wasn't on my primary machine, I'm not
> sure I'd have too much problem with shared hardware.  If one was to do
> co-location, there'd certainly have to be some kind of rules in effect. But
> unless I'm missing something, I don't see the work load in managing the
> network being significantly greater with several hosts over just one.

But the responsibility is greater.  If something goes down and it's just
my site, my own priorities determine how seriously I take it and when I
get around to fixing it.  When the services affects twenty paying
"customers" it's quite a different matter.  (I take my downtime quite
seriously myself... but I'm still not sure I'd want someone other than my
own users depending on me as well.) 

And there's security... how well would participants be screened?  If
everyone's using a shared machine (the easiest way to go and probably the
only reasonable one, since the cost of co-locating a box and maintaining
it yourself is high compared to just buying web hosting), who's going to
ensure that every piece of CGI run on the shared web server is secure?

I still like the idea on general principle.  I'd love to be able to afford
more bandwidth based on a coop of some kind... even my 33.6k modem sits
idle most of the time, but when it's not idle, it's usually saturated.  
It would be great if system administration could be shared... keeping up
on security alone is a real pain.  (And is really the bulk of what I do
now days it seems like... watch bugtraq and keep up on security updates.)  
Except that I'm not sure I'd trust my machine's administrative access to
anyone I didn't know real well. 

I guess part of my question is what level of service will people want?  
If all people want is a domain web site and email, that wouldn't be too
big a deal.  But I can't see doing it for less than what SouthWind charges
for a Virtual Web Site (which has its own IP) unless we had a lot of
users.  Consider that ISDN will cost about $360 a month... that's 18 users
just to bring the cost down to $20 each, and you can get web hosting for
that already, and on a site with far more than 128K of bandwidth.  That
seems like a heck of a lot of trouble to share an ISDN line... and if you
want to talk fractional T-1, it gets even more expensive so we'd need even
more users to break even.  (At least you can run a heck of a lot of web
sites off of a single machine.)

For me, the reason for having a dedicated service is to provide services I
can't reasonably buy elsewhere... namely, a highly-customized/specialized
mailing list server with integrated web sites and web-based reading.  (Not
that *I* want web-based reading, but it's a service that some of my users
want.)  What reason do others have?  Just to run your own web server or
similar service?  If that's the case, then those folks won't be satisfied
with just having a web site on someone else's server when they can get
that for less elsewhere. 

[ ISP terms forbidding running services ]

> I haven't checked, but that's most likely true.  

It's true with both SouthWind and RoadRunner.  

--
Carl D Cravens (raven@xxxxxxxxxxx)
He died to take away your sins, not your mind.