Is a home server good enough ?
ja27: I ran a couple servers at home using "business class" cable a few years ago. Real static IPs, my own DNS servers, etc. It absolutely sucked as far as the network. We never got close to the outbound bandwidth we were sold. I could have lived with it being 50% but it was often so slow and laggy that it was unusable.The worst part was the almost complete lack of support. We had about 1 short outage a month of an hour or so, but about 1 long outage every 3-6 months. I was down for 3 days once because some cable installer screwed up inside the junction box out by the street. No matter how I screamed, I couldn't get someone out quicker than their usual residential "whenever we feel like it" schedule. I did however get 3 days knocked off my bill. That didn't make a dent in my pissed-off customers though. That's the day we started to move to a bargain colo. (That wound up sucking just as badly except they were on the other side of the country.)And remember, that's all with "business class" officially sanctioned hosting-grade cable. If you host on the sly, with dyndns and sneaking it in on your residential cable, I know how the story will end. You'll grow for a month or three then one day they'll cut you off or block port 80 on you. You'll be down for days as you scramble to get hosted on a real server and get the DNS updates out.You can do it, but you need to plan for that eventuality. It would be great if there were some matchmaking service for really small startups where they could share a VPS or a full-blown colo server.