Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2013 13:06:23 +0000 From: Arthur Chance <freebsd@qeng-ho.org> To: Chris Stankevitz <chrisstankevitz@gmail.com>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Running FreeBSD for my personal website: collocation, cloud, etc. Message-ID: <52C2C14F.3000809@qeng-ho.org> In-Reply-To: <CAPi0psuMqdJ091ddSch97K5WvEHyNHYSiAAr2ZbDr1wZfw7tOw@mail.gmail.com> References: <CAPi0pssHTPBFa-9CSs7PsYcMXD34NB8KMdJh9OGJnZ%2B=-JbYtA@mail.gmail.com> <CAPi0psuMqdJ091ddSch97K5WvEHyNHYSiAAr2ZbDr1wZfw7tOw@mail.gmail.com>
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On 28/12/2013 06:22, Chris Stankevitz wrote: [I'm a bit late but have been offline over the holiday.] > On Fri, Dec 27, 2013 at 6:22 PM, Chris Stankevitz > <chrisstankevitz@gmail.com> wrote: >> Can you recommend a place/procedure by which I can easily (and >> cheaply) get up and running with a "publicly accessible" FreeBSD >> machine > > Thank you for the quick replies everyone. I guess by "cloud" I was > half-wondering if I was going to get a response like this: "Go to > amazon.com/cloud, click 'sign up with a freebsd 9.2 machine', provide > a root password, and you are good to go! Lucky for you the cost is > per CPU cycle and since nobody visits your site, it should cost you > only $1/month. Bonus: you get a static IP!" > > Turns out, Cox Cable in Santa Barbara, CA will upgrade me to a static > IP that allows incoming ports 80 and 25 for $100/month (double what > I'm paying for my residential connection). Ouch. Here in the UK I get a static /29 assignment for no extra charge. That's a FTTC ADSL link, 60Mb/s down, 21 Mb/s up, UKP 35.4/month which is about $59/month. Some ports are blocked by default, but will be opened on request for no charge. The major concern with running your own server at home is reliability - how badly will it affect you if your link goes down, or there's a power cut or if your hardware fails? A personal machine usually doesn't have to be as reliable as a business machine, but consider the possibility of the machine having a disk failure just after you've left on a long holiday - would you need your email for the duration or not? Some people would be fine without email on holiday, others wouldn't. (My wife's a freelance consultant who'd kill me if she couldn't access her mail every day, even when on holiday :-) Colocation usually ensures you power and networking (although backhoe operators are *very* good at finding power and network cables), but it's your machine and if it fails it's your problem and it's common that you have to drive to the data centre to fix it. Also the service is usually expensive. The "cloud", i.e. virtual or real servers in a managed data centre with some level of hardware management and often SLA agreements is the usual way to go if you need (almost) constant on. Sadly many providers don't do *BSD, but rootbsd.net specialises in FreeBSD. Amazon has FreeBSD instances thanks to Colin Percival's sterling work, but for the micro instances you still pay the Windows tax (75% extra in the EU!), and any Amazon instance can be shot with no notice, so you have to deal with that. Not really for beginners except to play. Google Compute Engine recently announced they support FreeBSD, but they treat it like a Linux distro (!) and I've yet to find any FBSD specific documentation. Rackspace supports FBSD (again calling it a Linux distro). It can be a bit difficult to find that out, but this page shows what they support http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/features/ And finally, there are quite a few other smaller players. This FreeBSD News article from June lists some http://www.freebsdnews.net/2013/06/05/reliable-customer-friendly-freebsd-hosting/ and I'll add some others I've discovered. These are European rather than US, as a) I'm in the UK and b) I've been following Edward Snowdon's revelations with interest. :-) http://www.cloudsigma.com/ http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix_vserver/vserver-produktmatrix http://www.elastichosts.com/cloud-hosting/cloud-servers/
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