the fun of connectivity

Monday, September 13, 2004, at 07:52AM

By Eric Richardson

Thanks to the generosity of a friend, my server's been colo'ed in various places in the Bay Area for five years now. By the end of the month, though, that's finally going away. Now I get to figure out what I plan to do next. I think my choice is between running my web stuff off my DSL and buying a Linode. I really want full box access, so a shared hosting plan like dreamhost wouldn't quite cut it for me. My usage isn't really all that great -- I maybe push out 40meg of web traffic daily -- so I'm not in a position where I need a ton of outbound bandwidth.

Currently my DSL is 1.5m down, 384k up, but Speakeasy has a 6.0/768 plan for about $100/mon. That's pretty tempting, considering I currently pay about $60. If I'm going to put money into connectivity, why not have it be connectivity that I'll use and enjoy? I could throw two ethernet cards in the webserver and do a little traffic shaping to ensure some bandwidth is reserved for the web site.

I think that's probably the direction I'll head. While making my decision I need to build a box to use as my temp webserver. I have all the components lying around my bedroom, except a case. I don't think that's going to be a problem. I love scrappy computing.