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So I have a spare PC at home...
Anyone using a spare PC to run something like KVM or OpenVZ?
I'm interested to know if anyone has, and if so, how has it worked for you? To share it over the 'net, you obviously you have to comply with your ISP's TOS, but other than that (and bandwidth limitations) what advantages/disadvantages do you see in home-brewing a VPS host vs a cloud solution like a dedicated server?
**Disclaimer: **I'm not considering this for commercial use, but more as a proof-of-concept or tool for tinkering/learning about managing a VPS host.
Comments
Hosting at home can be great, just remember that pretty much everything goes over the upload portion of your line... In my case that's 1mbit..
I have ran some test systems and updates on VM's hosted on a node at home.
Nothing that would ever be ready for production etc. though or even anyone external really connecting.
Also remember the power costs for having a old/spare machine on 24/7.
I wouldn't host anything that's accessible from the internet on my home connection. Plus with such cheap VPSes/dedis there's no need. in some cases it's probably cheaper to rent in a DC than pay power for a box to run at home.
After recent offers I would have to agree.
Excellent points!
Depends of your country power cost. Home is Reccomended as you can build a server far more powerful at home But for lowend server it would be better to buy then at home
to me the big problem would be the network connectivity and speeds
@jbarr I almost always test things on a home VM before doing them for real. This is not for production use, of course. KVM is real easy to use for virtualization if you install CentOS. Don't know about the Debian world.
hosting public services on your home connection is like the worst idea ever.. if you recieve a random DDoS attack on that IP your own internet connection is gone! GG!
You could hide your real IP behind CloudFlare, although I'm not sure if it's possible to completely hide it and not have it disclosed in any circumstances (by CF). Alternatively you could use a HE.net IPv6 tunnel, and point CloudFlare to that. If it gets disclosed, just kill the tunnel and get a new one.
Still with today's prices on dedicated servers, not to mention VPSes, it makes very little sense to host websites from home.
But since the OP said it's
sure go for it, and for those purposes technically you don't even need to open that to the Internet, or have any particular upload speed available.
>
If I'm not mistaken, he.net assigns a block to a IPv4 and gives that one even after destroying-creating.
I looked into it but it's costly either power wise or by having to buy newer more efficient hardware. You're better off with a hosted KVM or a kimsufi / online dedicated server. In the long run they are probably cheaper and more reliable options.
Really what the cost differences come down to is the data centers have scale and you don't.
am going to need such a thing for accessing like netflix hulu etc..
I don't think I can find a host that would be willing to do 4TB of secure space for the £10 a month I pay in electric for my home server. It's not the end of the world if I can't stream my linux ISO's on the bus, and I don't use it for hosting anything critical.
Also gigabit access to files from in home is great!
I have a similar system for my media, with a few drives that are sync'd to boxes around the world but not the whole lot.
That's a good point actually, for something public-facing or playing around with something/testing I wouldn't use a home server but secure storage is a good point. At the moment I'm having to pay Online to store my linux ISOs...
What do you think of this? http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/hp-proliant-n54l-microserver-137-88-inc-vat-delivery-99-54-after-30-cashback-serversplus-1990409
Ask your school/college/work IT department first, I'm sure they will have some unwanted old servers or even desktops that they can give away for free!
Old desktop = probably works good as a heater with fall/winter coming up. I finally convinced a guy to get rid of his P4 heaters/"servers". His wife was happy when the electricity bill dropped dramatically.
use them for inhouse training purpose...
Also depending on what chip your using you won't get vt-x and other extensions.
Exactly. I'm crippled with poor bandwidth so do all dev work on a home server. Infinitely faster than trying to work across the Internet. It's a retired laptop with no screen, so power usage is minimal
In addition to web serving it also does DNS for the home network, so I can easily test dev sites on all computers/devices I have.
It also hosts stuff that I don't want out on the Internet, like a billing/accounting app.
I've thought about doing this but then quickly realized the older system(s) would cost me more in electricity than simply buying a VPS. Although I do use several, local virtual machines for dev purposes.
Also, my home upstream is 1 Mbps; not exactly a lot to work with.
My school stil uses them. Sadly, no way to get one old system for free
Here's a question: Why does power cost so much in your country(s)? (for those complaining of power usage above.) Some of my old workstations have power supplies as small as 120W, that I don't even nearly reach the top 50% thereof; with full CPU load and a full mobo of RAM. There are no PCI cards, and no graphics card (duh); and I only use SSDs (mobo RAID as well.)
I've had no problem hosting home instances for development and lab testing on about $5/mo worth of power, (+$20 ammeter/voltmeter combo bar I have the computer plugged into, so I can monitor the power usage; as I to was concerned regarding the above until I actually went and tested it out.) 2TB of RAID10 storage, 32GB of RAM, single i5 quad core processor; it's not a bad storage system and test box..
$5.00/month sounds about right when I calculated it. The issue for me is that my $15.00/year RamNode machine is cheaper... And it has redundancy and a 1 Gbps shared network port.
At home, I run a Dell T110ii server with an i7 and 16 GB of ram. There are 2 x 1 TB and 2 x 2 TB drives in it. I experiment and test with Vmware, Openvz, Proxmox and Hyper-V.
Not too worried about costs as we pay nothing for electricity so the server runs 24/7.
Home internet connection is 2.5 Mbps up / 25 Mbps down, but never any need to connect to the home network outside of the home.
For anytime, anywhere internet testing and hosting, I also have:
3x €1.99 Dedibox kidéchire servers from online.net
1x €9.99 Dedibox SC gen2 from online.net
1 x 1 GB ram VPS from Ramnode
I retired my still-fully-functional p4 and p3 machine which was serving was a seedbox and NAS just because of the power/noise/space it takes. Saved the cost of replacing/upgrading the failing/aging parts and now a dd-wrt router with a 2TB ext HDD/NAS works as much better replacement.
I just set up a DNS for that on an OpenVZ box with INIZ
PM me if you want access man.
In total I pay around £30 a month for electric, but with no tumble drier/microwave. I guess I should get a wall meter thing to measure my server/switch/router's power consumption.
@rm_
cloudflare is just a reverse proxy, whatever your home server might hosts could leak the real ip since its broadcasting to the public (email server header, indexed by search engines, etc.) if you wanna make sure your IP is covered then you'd have to bind it to another server using a GRE/OpenVPN tunnel - but this would defeat the whole purpose of using your home connection to host anything since you'd need to rent a server somewhere else!
This is just one of the many security risks that you would have to deal with! Your home connection IP should be hidden as much as possible because if it gets hit or hacked you will have no internet anymore, doing the opposite (broadcasting it to the public) is foolish in my opinion.