Moving Servers Out of Garage

I have been running production servers from my garage in the past few years, but this approach suffers from the following issues:

• Consumer broadband is not reliable enough – although broadband such as cable or DSL are much more reliable then before, they are no where near the 5-9s needed for production servers
• Home power source is not reliable enough – power source at home are also unreliable, power outage are frequent occurrences, and automatic backup power capability causes quite a bit of capital
• Hardware eventually also breaks down and needs maintenance

The above more or less caused me to be stressed about my servers whenever I am away for an extended period of time.  It’s time to make a change and unchain myself from my garage setup, and find a different option for my servers.

The potential options are as follows:

• Shared Web Hosting
  • Pro
    • Cheap
  • Cons
    • the only standard configurations (such as LAMP) works.  Since I run Racket web server, this is out of question
• Virtual Private Servers
  • Pro
    • Full access of a virtual server
    • Cost – Able to buy a “slice” of server if one do not need a lot of computing power
    • Others manage the HW; I only focus on SW
  • Con
    • Cost – for an equivalent colocation slice
• Colocation
  • Pro
    • Best bang for the buck – a single U is cheaper than multiple slices of VPS
  • Con
    • Back to manage the HW myself
    • Cost – high if I only want a slice of power

Since my goal is to unshackle from the HW for the time being, VPS appears to be the best option.  I will be moving my servers online in the next few weeks.