Cost And Benefits Of Running Your Own Server

May 15

There 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.

1. Learn more about how the Internet works by becoming more than a user, become a cog.

2. Know exactly where all of your data is stored

3. 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.

4. 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).