People who have been here several years know that I’ve bounced a web server around on long trips, and the server currently is hanging from a cable connection in my home. Back in the “FindAnISP.com” days, I was paying $400 a month to have a physical server in Chicago connected to top quality bandwidth and “failsafe” power.<\/p>\n
While looking at Radio Station web sites, I discovered a significant number of them are pointing at a company that offers “Virtual Linux” webhosting.<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.linode.com\/ This is a pretty viable alternative to what I’m doing now. If I wasn’t needing the bandwidth to serve web pages, I could get by nicely with AT&T’s DSL (4 MB\/sec) and dump Time Warner Cable (and the coming Comcast) who thinks NTP is some “hacker tool” and save $40 a month (at least for the first 12 months)<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.linode.com\/pricing<\/p>\n If I signed up for this, I’m essentially renting a virtual server somewhere out there in “the cloud”. What I actually “own” would be sitting in “SSD” (Solid State Disk – which is blazingly fast) and I would only be billed for the amount of time my virtual server is actually in use (but for my case, it would be on full time).<\/p>\n The $20\/month plan is similar to my current physical computer except that: What I would lose is the ability to reach over and press a reset button – but since this is a virtual web server, there is no physical button.<\/p>\n I doubt I’ll do anything about this in the near future, but you can see why “cloud computing” is such an obvious choice for the future, and why PC Connection trying to sell people physical servers is a dead-end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" People who have been here several years know that I’ve bounced a web server around on long trips, and the server currently is hanging from a cable connection in my home. Back in the “FindAnISP.com” days, I was paying $400 … Continue reading
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\n – disk is SSD
\n – bandwidth is limited to 250 Mbits\/sec rather than the current 4 Mbits\/second (60x more)
\n – no worries about power outages
\n – no worries about the physical security of the computer
\n – 3 TB of outbound transfer vs several hundred GB before I would probably be told to buy a “business” account
\n – protection from Denial of Service attacks<\/p>\n