Going from Colocation to In-House, smart?

[modem]

Hey all,

I'm posting this for some research regarding possibly moving my server from being hosted in a co-location data center in Seattle, WA into a rented office for my business.

The reason for this is recently there has been an issue where our main server went offline and was not responding to pings, http, ssh, mail, etc requests. Everything 'went dead'. Normally there are small issues that cause outages every 8 months or so for an hour or two and customers really don't notice or make issue. However this outage happened 8pm EST Wed (12/9) and today is Sat (12/12) and I still not have heard any word as to what the issue is. I don't know if it's a server failure or a network failure in the datacenter.

Regardless, because I'm 3000 miles away a few hours westward of Washington DC, it's impossible for me to troubleshoot. So with customers wanting to strangle me for the downtime and pretty much starting to cancel service, I'm left figuring out how to recover from this and prevent this in the future.

I am considering two potential avenues to take immediately after this fiasco is resolved.

1.) Keep the server(s) in the same data center (low hosting cost) so that if this was a hardware failure then I am considering planning on having a hot-swappable second server to minimize downtime to an hour or two and have data restored from a previous nights backups. That way access to one is always available while the other can be repaired.

2.) Move the server(s) closer to my main office here in Virginia. Rent an office where there is fast internet (Comcast Cable, no FIOS at the moment) and run the server/sites off of it. However this presents another difficult situation to figure out. Is it recommended by you the fellow experts to run a server off of comcast's high end business class cable?

Anyone have thoughts or suggestions?? After taking the brunt of customer backlash, I've been stuck in a difficult position. That is trying to allay customer fears while not being able to do anything other than email/call the data center and figure out what is happening. I would like to have more control over this, but wonder... how reliable is Comcast Cable for reliable server hosting?

I have several dozen sites, none with 20,000+ visits per day or anything, email is the most traffic on the server at the moment.

Brad

 

[scsi]

There is nothing wrong with comcast business class. Just remember that the connection is not going to be as fast as a high end datacenter. You also have a single point of failure. If your connection goes down your sites go down...unlike datacenters that use multiple internet connections to prevent that from happening.

 

[nobaloney]

Discussion points with Comcast:

What is their guaranteed uptime? 99.9% is 43 minutes per month. And what do they do when it's down? Pay you something? Or fix it promptly?

What is their average downtime per month? On the local loop you're going to be using?

Are you getting a synchronous or asynchronous connection? At what speed outbound?

Do they bill based on total data throughput? Or do they give you a pipe you can fill?

Do they allow webhosting for others on the connection? If they don't specifically allow it, do they have any policies, obvious or hidden, which will cause them to slow down or disconnect your connection based on speed, data total, or other?

Do they block any ports at all, inbound or outbound?

And what about power? How many hours can you keep your server(s) running in the event of a general power failure? Your datacenter is probably supplying you conditioned sinewave power for hours to days. You can buy a good sinewave UPS in the $750 range, but it usually will keep one or two servers up only fifteen minutes or so.

Jeff