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Comment by willholloway | Hacker News Reader

Its a lot cheaper to buy the fastest consumer cpu + 32gb ram + ssds and have it in the home office than it is to rent that same server in a good data center.

Having a 1gbps network would let you run more of your hardware at home where it's cheaper. This makes sense for certain specific cases.

For startups that need this power, hosting at home can save money. Also you can't beat the security of having physical access and control of your hardware.

For my app streamjoy.tv I run all the intensive tasks on a core i7 at home and then just push the rendered results to a $5 a month digital ocean vps.

For the kind of computation that I am doing it is much less expensive and faster to use my local hardware and push static pages to my nginx server at digital ocean.

If I had a 1gbps connection I would run even more of my setup at home. Its not that important for the features I have coded so far but in the future it would be helpful.

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While this is a valid point. I assume you are probably violating the ToS laid out by your ISP. In general a "home" or "personal" account is not allowed to run a webserver. There is usually strict language in the ToS regarding this.

Can anybody comment on whether or not this any different with Google Fiber? Are they fine with you running whatever you want on that connection?

"Unless you have a written agreement with Google Fiber permitting you do so, you should not host any type of server using your Google Fiber connection"

http://support.google.com/fiber/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...

(Whether they will enforce this remains to be seen.)

I am not talking about hosting the web server locally, and I don't for my setup. In my opinion however ToS that prohibit running local web servers are an outrage. The ISP should be a dumb pipe, and this betrays the spirit of net neutrality.

> For startups that need this power, hosting at home can save money. Also you can't beat the security of having physical access and control of your hardware.

Really? You can't beat the security of hosting servers in your basement with a top-tier datacenter with armed guards, mantraps, insurance, fire suppression, redundant power and internet, etc.?

My AWS instances are likely orders of magnitude more secure than a server sitting in my house.

In addition to physical security there's hardware longevity as datacenters tend to be both more efficiently cooled and cleaner than the average home, efficient network interconnect rather than consumer-grade hardware on consumer-oriented last-mile infrastructure, redundant power... the list goes on and on.

It seems like the grandparent poster really should rent part of a co-located rack instead.

I don't think there's much sense in hosting locally in a home environment with Google Fiber for almost any use case regardless of their ToS or the service's quality: for a system serving user requests a home doesn't deliver reliability or redundancy, for a lightly-utilized offline processing system a cloud provider is almost universally cheaper, and for a heavily-utilized offline processing system power and cooling costs become competitive with a datacenter relatively quickly (not to mention the cost of downtime - if you're at high utilization, downtime will cause your job queue to build rapidly and possibly insurmountably when you can't supply burst capacity).

> It seems like the grandparent poster really should rent part of a co-located rack instead.

For my use I need the fastest CPU + ram + IO I can get for as little as possible. The network does not need to be the best because this is not serving user requests.

I do not want to take the time to make my code run in parallel. An Intel Core i7 3770k with SSDs is the cheapest scaling I can get.

I use the same machine as a workstation for coding.

This setup saves me $180 a month at the cheapest dedicated host I could find + I have a blazing fast work station.

> Really? You can't beat the security of hosting servers in your basement with a top-tier datacenter with armed guards, mantraps, insurance, fire suppression, redundant power and internet, etc.?

Yes, a data center has armed guards. Those armed guards are not loyal to you and they are not observable to you.

If you are a startup with a trade secret written in code that is incredibly valuable and absolutely can not get out, self hosting gives you a kind of physical security that is hard to get running your code on rented machines.

I am not saying that this is my case, but I could see a case where it would apply.

Lets say you have developed extremely profitable algo trading strategies. If they are the kind of strategies where millisecond execution is paramount, of course you have to co-locate.

If your strategy is not under that kind of time constraint I would want my algos on machines only I could access.

If it's valuable enough to bribe datacenter guards, it's probably valuable enough to break into your office/home.

So use your vastly profitable strategy to build or acquire a dedicated facility and hire or build a security system loyal to the company, not put machines in a random basement in Kansas City.

Production servers really don't belong in houses for many reasons besides connectivity and Google Fiber sure doesn't change that.

Most algo traders try to be as physically close as possible to the exchange. NASDAQ OMX even runs colo in the same datacenter as the nordic exchanges that traders can hire into.

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