Running your own public server on home ADSL

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Hey Guys,

Before I take the plunge, I'm looking for some opinions on this. What do you think about the risks of running your own server from your home broadband connection ? I have heard several reports that ISPs will cut you clean off if they find a live server on the end of your connection. Does anyone know if this is true, or a common occurence ? I certainly know from my last job that plenty of people ran their own servers on our connections, and we were OK about it unless abuse was suspected.

I am contemplating variously a mail, web and ftp server, with highly restricted access (aka no more than a handful of friends and family) having access, so should be pretty low bandwidth.

Do any of you already do this ? Am I worrying about something that is quite common, and therefore almost considered accceptable ?

Any input at this stage gratefully received

 

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Well my hard-shelled friend, I dont run any servers, but I did read in the paper a couple of weeks back that ISPs will be catching out people who upload heavy amounts of data. The reason for this is to cut out illegal downloading and all that. But I know thats not what you're going to be doing...as you say you wont be using much bandwidth so I would say go for it...who is your ISP tho? I dont know if they will stop you unless there is some serious uploading happening. Otherwise you should be fine. No doubt the others may have their views but thats mine...HTH...

 

Thanks Noel - I'm with Tiscali, and although I haven't heard specific ISPs mentioned, they are big enough to be wary about what's going on on their network.

I know at our place at work just now (web hosting) we keep a very close eye out for dodgy content and bandwidth abuse, but I am genuinely not interested in either of these - this is pure and simply for personal use and for a select few others.

Be interested to hear other opinions as well

 

Interestingly, I've just read Tiscali's AUP (acceptable usage policy), which states the following:

and

Together (and I am not attempting to quote the above out of context to support my view here - hence posting the link above) these suggest that what I want to do is not against the principles of the AUP, and therefore I should be OK.

 

Cool, Gav. You should set up a different subnet and configure it as a DMZ in your router, to host your Internet accessible servers. Or are you just going to port forward the requests?

 

And also will your IP address be static?

I have Charter here, and may do the same thing in the future. However, Charter says that I have to convert my account to a "business" account which will give me a static IP address.

 

I only have dynamic IP addressing, but already have dynamic DNS set up, and all the necessary port forwarding set on the router ( I have run a few tests before now - hosting a site, mail server, etc)

Everything is good to go - just the legalities I'm now concerned (or not) about now ...

 

You need to check that the ports are not blocked. Many ISPs now block popular ports incoming because they are usualy a source of spam.

The other problem is the lack of bandwidth. If you are a server then the relevant speed is the upload value, and that is often poor. Two people on the server may get a lower speed than from dialup!

Harry.

 

Have you decided to go for it Gav? Will you be using 2K as your server?

 

HI Gav

Have you asked the question of your ISP? If not drop them an e-mail.

This is something I'd like to do when I finish my degree and just for fun as I suspect it is more hassel that it is worth.

 

@ Boyce - yeah, will be w2k adv to start with anyway.

@ Sandy - note I quoted from Tiscali's acceptable usage policy earlier in the thread. Whilst not contacting them directly, I can't see how I'm in breach (I will be monitoring bandwidth closely) of their AUP.

@ Harry - standard ports will be used, and as stated, monitored closely.

Thanks to all so far - I fired up the ftp server last night (although it's down again due to a hard drive failure) and mail will not be running, as I got a couple of pop boxes buckshee from work today on the family domain name. so one less service required.

And damn it, it's all good fun

 

I'm thinking of running a web server too.

I have a static IP, 768kbps upload speed and dmz enabled router so should be ok with it!

Jaka, how do you find Tiscali? I've heard some bad things about them

 

Bearing in mind that this isn't ISPREVIEW or ADSLGUIDE, and we don't support ISP-bashing threads, I'd say they deserve a fair rating. Occasional disconnects, and often heavily-contended (IMO - I have no conclusive proof of this, but speed tests are often abysmal)

But let's face it - 2Mb line, uncapped, for £17.99 is OK, though I really saw no difference when I upgraded from a 1Mb line. Saying that, suffice to say that when my contract is up this year, I don't think I'll remain with them.

2€