Cost And Benefits Of Running Your Own Server
Tagged as: May 15There is a cost to running your own web server. I’m not talking about the actual monetary cost, although there definitely is some of that.
I’m talking about the down time and lack of production-level reliability. I just got my Internet connection back up after being down nearly the entire day! I had checked the status in the morning, and it was working. However, when I got to work I couldn’t access it. “Oh great,” I thought.
So basically I just lost a day of traffic, readership, etc. Great, that just stinks. You know I wonder what my uptime percentage is. I was thinking about it today as a result of not having it available, and I am positive that I am up more than 9 days out of 10. However, I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t claim more than 95%. Oh well.
Anyways, I think that the benefits to running my own web server outweigh the cost. Let me share what I think some of them are.
- Learn more about how the Internet works by becoming more than a user, become a cog.
- Know exactly where all of your data is stored
- Don’t have to pay for hosting costs (okay, okay there is the electricity to run the computer which is definitely something. But you’re not getting charged 15 bucks a month like you normally would be.
- Learn interesting server-related things such as configuring Apache. This is especially interesting for those who have a professional interest in computers I think.
Is it worth it to you? I don’t even know what the percentages are of people who run their own server. I actually don’t know too many people that do. Of course I guess that speaks more about the people that I know than what is actually going on. In any case, sorry for the downtime, and I’m back (for now).
hahah, i suspect that, for many (myself included) #4 on your list of benefits is more of a cost. i think i became mentally and emotionally drained by the time i had to figure out how to configure mysql and php
I tried hosting via a server in my home and it was not worth the savings.
@william
Well I’ll admit that it might be difficult to start off with (what isn’t?). However, I think that I find it hard to imagine that more knowledge and understanding is ever a bad thing. Wouldn’t you agree that anything worthwhile has some obstacles to overcome?
@HTMKSteve
Yeah I actually don’t think that the monetary savings is all that worthwhile, especially if the blog is being used as any source of income. It’s also probably not really that worthwhile when you have a large readership (although I suppose then you could just upgrade your connection on the income from it). So seeing as how much more traffic you get on your site than mine, I could see why it might be more worthwhile for me and less so for you.
However I think that it’s nice to have piece of mind that I control where my data is (it’s not in some data center far off and away) as well as all that I’ve learned (practically speaking) about running a server. For me, hosting has always just been a hobby and another thing to learn from. As it usually turns out, to each his own.
i know, i’m sad when your server is down
[...] to hosting my own blog (okay it’s not just limited to hosting yourself) in addition to other costs and benefits of running your own server is that you get to see statistics. You can install any type of tracking system. I personally am [...]
Hiii
can you plz tell me that how can i earn money from my own server & how much money i have to spend on server ?? what is the procedure to earn money from our own server ?? plz reply me ASAP…
i shall be very thankful to you..
Thanx & Regards
Kamal