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Datacenter internet vs Home internet. Other differences
teochristian
Member
in Help
I am a bit confused regarding home-hosting and hosting in a datacenter. What is the difference between my and their internet network. Lets say I have an internet of 100mbps download and upload at home (static IP). Are there any differences between the performance of my network and of a 100mbps datacenter? Does the datacenter as a good global connectivity or something else? Also, are there any performanxe differences between home hostibg and datacenter hosting other than location security and electricity (generators), and support? Thank you very much!
Comments
This is like asking the difference between a skateboard and a Ferrari. Multiple points of transit, failover, knowledgeable networking folks (sometimes), power backup, et al.
So, yes, they're both modes of transport, but they're nowhere near the same thing.
Calling it a "skateboard" is just being a snob about it.
Just about the only significant thing, is the lack of DDoS protection, and the general inconvenience if you get your home connection DDoS'ed. Plan for some means to change your IP at will if that happens.
Other than that, depending on what kind of stuff you want to host and what level of reliability you require, hosting from home can work just fine and can be a fun experience. Building and setting up physical servers you can touch, rather than renting something faceless and formless in a cloud far far away.
As a happy medium, I would suggest you consider getting a very cheap VPS from a DDoS-protected provider to use as a frontend (reverse-proxy). From there you would run a tunnel to your home setup. That way your home IP is not exposed, and the entry point from the internet is DDoS-filtered by the VPS provider.
Better yet, just order a DDoS tunnel and connect to it via GRE. Now you don't even need to pay for that static IP, your DDoS tunnel has one included. Now your on business network with lots of peering (because connections between visitors and the tunnel is their network's business) so your internet connection is solved (provided connection to the tunnel from your PC isn't bad). Only thing you need to worry about is keeping that PC online, so just hope you don't run into a power outage or a hardware failure (well everyone has that).
Depending on your ISP, your ISP may disallow hosting at home on their TOS. Ports could be blocked unless your using a tunnel, and your provider may bill you for overage or abusing the bandwidth. Just be careful.
It's easy to tell the difference in theory however difficult to see the reason why you pay for it, if you are to start off hosting personal self-hosted services. Essentially, if your home network performs 95% (of ideal server, like uptime, etc), you will need to pay $10/mo for +4%, $100/mo for +4.9%, and so on. That 0.1% of performance may impact some services seriously, or might not. Start off hosting your old laptop on your home network. You might be happy with it, or might not. If not, move on to VPS, and then to dedi.
@Edmond Only if you don't care about latency :P
What "DDoS tunnel" can you order for less than 3-4 EUR/month (OVH's VPS-SSD) for 100 Mbit unmetered? Moreover there were some even cheaper yearly VPS offers with DDoS protection as well, at about $20/year and some way lower. As in many other cases (e.g. a VPN), the specialized product will lose out hard to just buying a general purpose VPS and setting up the same thing yourself.
Well there's two problems.
A: you might not be near a OVH datacenter = rip latency
B: such protection isn't guaranteed really, so it might be better to have something that would make sure the service is up.
All depends on your ISP and how far you live from a PoP.
@Edmond Was talking about others (I'm relatively close to OVH; usually I get 10-15ms.).
Hanging a couple nodes off a cablemodem, or even consumer grade FIOS is nowhere near the same thing. Now, supposing that he has a true 100Mbit up/down, he may very well have nicer hardware- but with FIOS, I'd say there's little difference between that and a colocated 100mbit port, however there are still caveats:
For starters, you likely aren't advertising your own IP space, or even have anything that isn't assigned to your SOHO grade hardware. You probably have one peer, and it's probably a single point of failure. Your network is likely filtered upstream somewhere, and you may very well be blocked from using port 25, et al, which you are well aware of, but don't seem to feel is important to consider when the OP may have no idea how expensive it's going to get to try to run a semi-professional SOHO setup.
As he said 100/100, I imagine it's just like what I have at my apartment, an RJ45 UTP cable coming in, no "modem" or "FIOS" to speak of, just a regular Ethernet line to the ISP switch in the attic (connected at 10G optics to district-wide aggregation, and so on).
I do not even at any of the DCs that I use.
You have "one peer" (the ISP), but the ISP is most certainly multihomed.
Yes the line from your home to the ISP is another weak point. But get a couple ISPs and that's massively mitigated, in some ways you now get better resilience than some cheap DCs. The problem with this will be the need to handle running on two separate IPs, but then if you go the GRE tunnel route (from a VPS or otherwise), just a matter of quickly updating where the tunnel points to.
My ISP filters only irrelevant ports (to limit spreading of viruses), i.e. the Windows file sharing (Samba). Again if you get a tunnel even if they filter 80/443 that won't matter.
Oh so it's just like a DigitalOcean or Scaleway experience
Realistically though, don't expect to be sending mail directly from a home connection. That's one thing it basically can't do. Every mail service out there is not going to talk to a "residential" IP range, or will throw you right into the spam bin.
Or how cheap or free can it be if you use the hardware you already had lying around, or get on eBay.
I don't think anyone said anything about professional or even semi. I certainly hope the OP doesn't intend to sell his hosting services here on LET later on.
Some ISP is prohibited you from building a server, and if you don't really care about the latency and the SLA
I think you can get the same kind of tunnel with the new service of cloudflare:
https://warp.cloudflare.com/quickstart/
I don't think Comcast cable will ever figure out that I run a rack of Intel NUCs for warmth in the winter
Many NAS have a webserver function. Probably quite slow for a cheap NAS.
For DDOS simply use Cloudflare free service.
I would try it on a not too active domain to see if it really works. Actually I am curious about it myself with my 1000M line.
Just remember this will get expensive fast when it leaves beta as Argo will be required.
There was a certain Wigan datacentre power from a domestic business line wasn't there? It's not unheard of.
Thank you all for the answers. I am not going to sell hosting at this time. I want to host my websites only. So a bigger difference which could affect the performance is latency. The others are sla and no ddos protection. Thank you all!
Well latency all depends on your ISP. For me, if copper service, 5ms to ISP or over fibre 1ms. To a internet exchange, SIX, is 5-7ms, usually it's 5ms for me, so peers for me aren't really far away, just the connection between you and your ISP can fail.
The other thing is your ISP probably doesn't allow you to host services so they block ports like 80 or 25. If port 25 isn't blocked, it's most likely blacklisted because email servers shouldn't accept emails from dynamic IPs.
The servers under my dogs bed have been fine for uptime so far... so ya'll DC loving lefties can lick my nips.
derailAllThreads
FYI, easy ddos protection, is just to buy cheap as ddos protected VPS and use it to "Redirect" traffic.
is that supposed to be a political joke or something, as usually referring to a group of people as "left" refers to them as people who are favoring liberal, socialist, or radical views, or democrats. If so I laughed at that
anyways there are certain other things as well, I have home internet via docsis and upload speeds seem to be capped at 12 up, even if I pay for 300 down.
I've just generally seen higher speeds, better peering and lower latency on DC connections rather than home connections.
I guess if you have a fiber/fibre connection with no limits, a dedicated IP, etc you can expect similar preformance, but in most cases many home internet connections are still delivered over ADSL, VDSL or DOCSIS
@teochristian
Depends. For a start, your home network is connected through multiple hops to the ISP and typically some of these hops are quite slow (e.g. dsl). Then, of course, there is the question of professionality; things like 24/7 technicians, redundancy, climate control, etc.
That said, I think a "home server" is a perfectly viable alternative for many scenarios such as a mom and dad site, the local bakeries site and email, etc.
As cars (and skateboards) came up, I'll put it like this: your home dsl is like a small second hand Fiat car. As long as you can live with some unreliability, limited transport capacity, occasional problems, say to drive to the super market twice a week, it'll do just fine.
A professionally hosted server is more like a Mercedes taxi. looked after each day by professionals, well taken care of, designed for reliability, etc.
Btw, a VPS seems to be an excellent compromise for most low-end scenarios. Very cheap /typ. a fraction of your dsl cost) yet quite professional.
HUGE DIFFERENCE.
Your $60 cable modem running to a $100 router vs a $5,000-60,000 switch/NAT.
Your home provider running cable to your house vs Fiber straight to the datacenter.
Your Single provider vs multiple providers
Your single point of routing vs multiple fast direct hops
Your home's puny power lines vs data centers massive power delivery systems.
Your 20min battery backup vs days-weeks worth of power backup
Your homes puny structure vs CAT 4-5 rated Datacenter
Your homes dirty dirty air pumping dust into your components vs data centers constantly filtered and cleaned air supply.
Your Internet provider monitoring your traffic and keeping you responsible for anything transferred on it vs datacenter being understanding of potentially clients impacting your traffic vs you directly..
Honestly I could go on but you get the point, the comparison is drastic. With Co-Location deals ranging from $35-75 a month here for extremely amazing data-centers it's difficult to understand why would want to take that all at home instead. Also if you ever take a holiday and your stuff goes down who are you going to call?
There is a reason co-location is still alive and healthy despite 100-300mbps lines being affordable. Heck there are 1gbit lines being offered to homes now yet no one is going to consider a co-location solution in someones basement
This post summed up in one pic
Why when you can get Frantech's BuyShared for $5 a year?.... Thats less than 50 cents a month for a more reliable web/email solution
I take it your european? I was shocked when I got a mercedes taxi with front seat warmers and plush leather... State side taxi's are garbage in comparison!
Absolutely assuming your comfortable managing your own server or at-least installing/maintaining an open source management console. VPS are a wonderful solution to start.
@sureiam
Etc, etc ... we can make that list DC vs home server as long as you like - but that's not the point.
Look, I have a couple of Igel boxen (via C7) running since 5+ years on a cheap home office ups. Downtime? 0 so far.
I don't care to run a home or office web server and I would certainly not put a business critical site on a home server. I do, however, put the de facto (technically) primary DNS server at the office.
Reason: There are more factors than what you see (100$ vs 50000$). Trust and control are examples. I can easily install surveillance and have control that would not be possible in a DC (unless being a large customer).
I like that example also because it shown another interesting point, namely: It must not be looked at A vs. B. One can, in fact, combine the approaches. One can have certain equipment at the office -and- have other equipment somewhere in a DC, such enjoying the combined advantages.
Btw, don't take that as an attack but your view seems to be very biased (to avoid saying "stupid"). It's utterly meaningless whether a router costs 50$ or 500.000$. What's relevant is whether that box performs as needed and is reliable. My Igel boxen had an average price tag of 25$ (I got them second hand but from a good source) and, as I said, some are running 5+ years reliably.
Similarly it's totally irrelevant whether a router can do 50Mb/s or 400Gb/s as long as no more than 50Mb/s are needed.
Nobody's mentioned contention ratios yet?
Most ISP's sell you a package with easily a 20:1 contention ratio, whilst datacenter bandwidth is usually sold as dedicated.
Overall, a datacenter experience will be a whole lot more stable.
Some of these arguments don't apply if you have FTTH. The latency can be quite good. My first couple hops used to be 25-45ms. Now it's more like 5ms. Speed is not an issue. I consistently get 250Mb/s up/down at all times of day/night.
Still not suitable for replacing a datacenter for all the other reasons mentioned. Redundant power/routers/switches/peering/physical fiber to the building, physical security. Ok for some things like backup servers. Terms of service for home service often doesn't allow hosting servers. A lot of providers block outgoing on port 25 and 80/443 among others.
ya I agree it's all a matter of what you need. For me it's a matter of cost to reward. For $35-50 I can have a 1gbit line in a top tier data center for a 1u server. The cost of power alone would probably be $15 or so a month minimum nevermind the fun oh so fun fan noise of a 1u. If you hang around $35 co-location deals are not unheard of. For $3-5 A YEAR I can have legit hosting for a website and email, offloading the hours of maintenance and support a proper public webserver/email server needs for literally pennies a month.
So it comes down to co-location/webhosting vs local to me and the cost difference after factoring in sound damping and electricity and battery backups just doesn't make sense.
But if you wanna setup a Rasberry PI webserver (even hooked up to a cell phone sized battery backup) and let it churn away a small site for testing and fun than ya for sure that makes perfect sense. Learn linux, learn webhosting, and run it on a solution that costs almost nothing to run a month. Thats a fantastic way to get your feet wet on your own home network.