A Server for Me
Way back in the day, I bought web hosting service from one of the millions of web hosting companies online today. At the time I only had one website and was just getting my feet wet. I think I paid $99 for the whole year. That first year, my website went down for no less than 10 full 24 hour days for things that were the responsibility of the hosting provider – too much server load, inadequate bandwidth, etc. My rant is that this service and many others boasted the 99.9% uptime you see from virtually every provider around. Where are they getting this figure from, anyway? By my count a web hosting company claiming 99.9% uptime can only go down for 8.76 hours a year. Sharing this information with other webmasters only fuels the question. Their sites are going down far too often for anyone to be making this claim. It just makes me mad.
So mad in fact that I learned Linux and switched to managing my own dedicated server sometime in late 2003 or early 2004. Part of the reason my business has been so successful is my Dad. He owns User Friendly Computer Consulting, a computer consulting firm in the DFW area of Texas. Since he’s as big into technology as I am and had the resources to do it, he installed a full T-1 line in his home. This was just when VOIP was getting popular and he foresaw the ability to pipe in his television signal from the ether. Anyway, he had the connection and by nature of his business always had one or two spare computers lying around. He loaned one to me for over a year so I could learn Linux and run my own web server out of his house. Pretty cool.
The machine I used at the time was a monster. It was seriously huge. It was one of the Dell PowerEdge servers that weighed something like 150 pounds. I remember having to help him muscle it upstairs into his server closet so we could hook it up. Yes, I did say server closet. You have one, right?
Anyway, after installing the box and moving my first website onto it I quickly learned that running just one site on a 150 pound Dell PowerEdge server was kind of a waste, and I could add on pretty much as many other sites as I wanted with relative ease. Thus, the business we now refer to as Danifer Web Services was born.
With one site ticking along, I soon added a hobby site for my wife and a few more for myself. Her hobby soon expanded to cater to a 1000+ member base of chatty scrap booking women who posted to her forum while my sites started to generate a trickle of income. Things were great and everything grew. They grew so fast that in a year we had become a little over-reliant on the server, the connection, and my Dad’s network as a whole.
I quickly learned how much painful it could be to have a hundred or so scrap-bookers with your phone number on speed dial calling you while you were losing money and visitors because someone blew a fuse or decided to re-work the internal DNS structure by installing Windows Small Business Server.
The next step brought Danifer Web Services to its new home which is also my home in Lewisville, Texas just outside of Dallas. Having experienced less downtime with my Dad’s setup (even with blown fuses and middle of the night changes to the internal network DNS) than I ever had with a hosting provider, I decided to go the same route and keep a server in my own house. Since the old one was still on loan and a several thousand dollar piece of business capital, I couldn’t take it with me. I opted instead to invest in one for myself.
The server this website (and all the other) now resides on is a Dell PowerEdge SC430 purchased in December of 2005. It is powered by a Pentium 4 processor with an 800mhz front side bus, has over one gigabyte of RAM and boasts an 80 gig SATA hard drive. Its broadband service is provided by Verizon Fiber Optic for Business which I believe offers 2mbps upstream and 5mbps downstream. The entire system (both the server and the fiber optic network setup) are wired to a dedicated circuit in my home and have battery backup to sustain them for several hours should the power to my house fail.
Personally, I’ve been thrilled with the setup and the way Danifer has evolved. I’m interested to see where it goes from here. Maybe in five years I’ll have a server in a facility somewhere and will be sipping cheap beer on the beach somewhere in Brazil. My daughter would enjoy that.