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It's fine until your garage burns down / floods, or someone digs through your street's connection.

Those things are unlikely, but even with a backup you're going to have pretty horrendous amounts of downtime. You could lessen the impact by having some off-site secondary system ready to go at any moment, but then at that point you might as well be renting a server.




More than calamities, I'd worry about simply going away for a week or two and having something happen. With Linode/whoever, even if I'm somewhere remote, I suppose I can at least call or write email and get some help. If everything's at my house, what would I do? Leave the keys to a friend? "Can you feed the cats and take care of the servers in case they have a problem at 3AM?"


> "Can you feed the cats and take care of the servers in case they have a problem at 3AM?"

LOL now this would be a friend.


And depending on where you live you could add until someone walks in and walks away with your server (and all of your user's data on it).


As opposed to some government agency taking a hosting provider's server, and you happen to be on the same VPS as the "suspect"?


Well, according to this article [1] a burglary happens every 15 seconds. I highly doubt any government agency is that efficient, but even if it did happen and you have a backup you could be back live in a couple minutes. Just like the scalability comments below allude to, the key is having the infrastructure right and then everything else is easier.

[1]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/artsandliving/homeandga...


Actually, I think the key is what you just mentioned...

backup.


A backup won't do you any good if you don't have something to restore it to, so that is why I said infrastructure is the key.


Infrastructure won't do you any good if you don't have a backup, like you mentioned in your GP post.


worst comes to worst, I can walk into frys and throw together something shitty. (note, I don't recommend running prod. on Fry's hardware... just saying, if you said I needed a server in two hours, I could do it.)

if your data is gone, well, I can't help you.


Besides fire/flood/theft/etc, is the garage clean and climate controlled? I used to run a server in a basement during college, and burned through 2 disks and one motherboard before I finally figured out that warm, damp, and dusty basements with dirty power supplied by 1920's wiring weren't a great place to run servers.

For me, it's a peace of mind thing. I have better things to worry about than hardware.

Also, read the fine print on that Comcast plan. Their residential service is now capped at 250GB (not sure about business-class). In my experience, Comcast is the last company I would want involved anyways. Our service goes out frequently enough that I now have a backup WiMAX modem for my laptop.

Edit: thanks olalonde


piece of mind -> peace of mind




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