[lug] Coloc / VPS Plus Outside DNS & Email

[Daniel Webb]

On Tue, Oct 03, 2006 at 03:03:45PM -0600, dio2002 at indra.com wrote:

> regarding colocation/vps.. i was initially pretty gung ho to host my own
> webserver, nameserver and email.  mostly because i can.
> 
> but the more i think about it, i really only need to host my own
> webserver.  that's because my registrar godaddy(and most registrars)
> already provide email and i believe  a default nameserver for the price of
> the registration.  i simply change the registrar's zone file to point to
> my vps/coloc webserver and i'm good to go.  if i should happen to host a
> few other sites from others, i basically have them do the same thing. 
> they have to register anyway.

If you're already going to the trouble of running your own web server, you've
already spent some of the cost of running email and DNS as well.  If you
haven't done it before, there can be a learning curve to both, but probably
good skills to have.  They are both quite complex to fully understand what's
going on, I'd guess I know just enough to be dangerous to myself and others
after running my own apache/exim4/bind9 server for about 5 years :/
It's just a hobby for me though, I don't have to justify anything or answer to
anyone, which is how I like it.

Definitely not much economic advantage to run your own, and you have issues
like other have mentioned about downtime if something goes wrong.  At the same
time, you don't have to worry about a provider going out of business and
stranding you, and you don't have to ask for permission to do anything and
have full control over the system.  But if you're expensing your time, there's
no way you can justify it.