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The Internet

Personal Servers And "Commercial" DSL? 32

Posted by Cliff from the what's-the-big-deal-anyways dept.
Blue Dog Fever asks: "I've been helping a friend of mine look around for a DSL service provider. He doesn't need a lot of speed, but what he does need is the ability to place his own server on the DSL (in his case, it would be Web, e-mail, telnet, and maybe FTP). The only problem is, every DSL service provider we've looked at restricts the use of servers to their 'commercial' DSL offerings, which usually start at $120 a month and go up from there. What I'm wondering is if anybody knows of an ISP that lets people put up small servers for somebody that isn't interested in getting thousands of Web hits or huge amounts of e-mail traffic, but just wants to set up a small server for fun."
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Personal Servers and "Commercial" DSL? More

Personal Servers and "Commercial" DSL?

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  • I too live in Dallas and I run on a metered line. Their bronze package gives you 2.5G up and down plus static IPs for $23. About 450k down, and ~110k up is the best that my line(I'm at the edge of the service area) will do, but that's enough. DNS is $1 per month. If I run over the 2.5G limit, it costs $1 per 65M. No big deal, I have not come close to that except when I "tried". Their service is excellent including stats pages with usage graphs, automated email warnings when you get near your limit, phone calls(and questions) are quickly answered, pagers for emergencies, etc. Plus, they run linux and *BSD to do their work.

    SWBell provides the line.
  • But I believe the company which is using those banners is none other than the speakeasy.net mentioned by the original poster...
  • I have Flashcom, and I agree about the horrible service. The tech that they sent over didn't even know how to install the inside wiring, I had to start from scratch to get the service working, even though the tech had supposedly tested the installation. However, they do have a policy against personal servers (which I ignore.) The static IP is the only reason I haven't switched to another provider.
  • ** DISCLAIMER **
    Even though I work for Videotron, I am in no way related with the cable business
    ** DISCLAIMER **


    The 15kb limit reason really _is_ technical. Most cable cells are oversold. A place like St-Hubert is 180% oversold. Whatever they had planned for got shot to shit. In order to maintain decent service on the downstream (average mom and pop web downloads) they cut back on the upstream.

    If you live in a non-crowded cell (like I do , 6 modems in one cell, on brand new fiber)you will have an uplink restriction, but it'll be around 30k second. Downlink is extremely fast at anywhere between 500 and 800k per second.

    As far as bandwidth quota goes, you can cough up an extra 20$, get a second IP and 6Gb of extra bandwidth (which can be up or down, they dont regulate.) This should be more then enough for _anyone_ doing _LEGAL_ stuff with the box. I've been running a web/mail/ftp/ssh server for 15 months now, and never have I busted my quota.

    On the Bell DSL side, the sad truth is that they're so full of shit it smells a mile around. I ordered DSL the second day it became available in my area, and tested it side by side (on identical hardware) with the cable modem. They have 100K uplink and 10K downlink _IF_ you're lucky. And they make you go through ATM authentification and their shitty Fastproxy.sympatico.ca . Not worth 50$ / month.


  • That is basically the deal I have with CAIS Internet (www.cais.com). I have the service that they traditionally market to SOHO and small businesses. They call it "HyperLAN" for some dumb reason. I've got about 5 servers now doing misc. things and a small powerPC cluster is in the works.

    192k is small bandwith compared to the speed the residential cable modem and DSL users get but I like my quality of service and the pile of static IPs they gave me. It is also cheaper than what I was laying out for 56k DOV ISDN back in the day :)

    The freedom to push whatever the heck kind of data/services I want upstream more than makes up for the small pipe and higer cost. The acceptable use policies and terms that get forced on the residential contracts are just too limiting.

    Despite some initial problems I would recommend them as a solid ISP to deal with regarding DSL as long as you know enough to 'guide' their first level tech support people.

    I'm in the Boston area and CAIS is in the DC area so one downside is that my packets go through NYC and DC before actually getting out on the internet.
  • The Chicago area AT&T cable internet (formerly MediaOne Express) used to probe the systems connected to it for open ports. If they found a something that was not supposed to be there (http, ftp, telnet, etc.) they would send you a nastygram.

    They haven't done it recently (since AT&T bought them out), but I suspect they will start again once they get things stabalized.

  • We're about ready to roll out residental DSL and this story seems timely. Here's my take on it (usual disclaimers apply).

    We are a midsized regional ISP with a healthy and happy dialup base who are jumping ship to go with the damn cableco's (have I mentioned how much I hate monopolies that blatently lie in their advertising) so we are setting up with the only dsl wholesaler in town - the monopolistic phone company.

    The deal they offer us is pretty raw - without disclosing things, I can tell you that they are selling their service for just slightly more than $10 over what it costs us. Leaving us to provide (a) bandwidth, (b) servers, and (c) support and administration in less than $10/customer. The telco hides behind a bundling arrangement that saves you $10 if you use their LD service and claims that should give us $20/sub to spend on the rest of things.

    Given that a megabit of bandwidth still costs roughly $1500 - even in large quantities (this is for T1/T3/ethernet or fractions of) that means that to supply service under the price guidelines I have to have a bandwidth to user ratio of 1:150 which isn't so good. So... we back the land line bandwidth with some satellite caching (cidera skycache rocks my world) and then we start playing the bandwidth hog game...

    I see a multitude of problems with watching for and shutting down bandwidth hogs... mostly that some guy will get cut off cuz he uses the internet to babysit his preteenage kid and that kid is a massive mp3 collector.

    I wouldn't mind servers on residential connections - interestingly enough the telco says that if you are piggybacking dsl on a business line, you pay the business rate - so that makes it easier for me.

    I don't mind servers for non-commercial purposes, but if you're making even a single cent from that server, you should pay for it. I have to pay suppliers for things that are used by my company - why shouldn't you? For example, my techgeeks tend to have domain names of their own and tend to run rather expansive servers at home (they are happier when they have constant fan noise and 60Hz hum) which doesn't bother me at all. But if I found that they had page upon page of banner ads, I'd expect them to pay for the bandwidth that they are consuming (I know it's only the HTML, but damnit, I had to pay for that bandwidth)

    I guess my thoughts run all over the place on this stuff, but... it shouldn't be a big problem to pay for commercial use and be non-commercial if you are residential.

    Have a wonderful day all.

    M

  • Try speakeasy.net. [speakeasy.net] I've been with them for about two months, and they don't seem to mind servers at all. The price might seem a little high, but it's fast, reliable, and the main noc os is linux.
  • Flashcom "couldn't" sell me their $50/mo deal because they weren't able to get "sufficient line quality." Pacbell gave me their 384K sDSL for $50 w/ static IP -- I actually see ~1.1Mbps downstream even after 11 months of service.

    Flashcom finally refunded my deposit. It took 11 months, but they accidentally did it three times. Whoops!

    BTW: local telco techs told me servers weren't allowed unless I got a business account, but they didn't have any reason to check unless my IP was getting "unreasonable" usage. Whatever "unreasonable" means....

    -jeremy
  • I'm on a cable modem (ISPChannel, specifically). Last time I checked the EUA, there was no mention of servers at all. Not only that, but after emailing and calling them a dozen times, I was able to get them to set the reverse DNS for my 3 IPs to my liking. Then again, this month my latancy/packet loss went in the shitter, so I can't say I'm happy.

    Daniel

    ---

  • I shared Mediaone with my roommates when I lived in Cambridge, MA. It sucked. I ran a server and one of my roommates even mapped his domain name to it; that much worked fine. I used to ssh in from work and from home to work all the time, except when it wasn't working, which was a huge portion of the time. It eventually got into a permanent condition of only working for about 30 seconds, and then you had to do a network restart to get it working again. Maybe it was because they were scanning my ports and fucking with me because I was running a server -- I don't care, I will never purchase anything from them again.

    By the way, if someone else scans ports on their network, they get all excited and call the ISP about a hacking attempt. I know because I asked a friend to scan my box and attempt to break into it. It seems a little hypocritical for them to scan my box but complain about other people doing the same thing.

    Anyway, I am moving to Austin, Texas. What are people's experiences with broadband service there ?

  • I live in the Erie, PA area and was one of the first customers to get DSL. Had a few problems installing it since it was so new to the area but other than that it is all good. From what I can tell GTE [gte.net] lets you run servers. I've ran one from my computer for a few months and haven't had any problems yet, though I do currently only subsribe to "residential" service. (what the difference bettween residential and business is, I really don't know).
  • The fact that companies forbid the placement of "servers" on DSL is completely silly. Applications such as ICQ listen on ports on the machine they run on, which is no different from any other server process.

    As others have said, I'd recommend you just go ahead and get a non-commercial line from a provider (if the intent of the server is to be non-commercial), and just don't make a big deal about it. One word of warning however: if you're not paying for it, don't expect any support from the ISP if there are problems specific to your server processes.

  • Telocity [telocity.com]
    They don't care what you do with your connection as long as you aren't running a comercial site (and I'm not sure if they only really mean as long as you aren't reselling the bandwith for XYZ company's webpage).
    Of course, they may not be in your area.
    HTH
    Gregg
  • (cidera skycache rocks my world)

    Know a guy who works there, says they have these little rackmounts with the CPU/etc, a UPS, and satellite hookup all in one thing. The only plugs in the back are 2 RJ45s and 2 power cables. I want one. :)
  • Everyone's Internet at http://www.ev1.net/dsl/ allowed servers as of a couple of months ago. At that time, their FAQ specifically addressed the issue and said that servers WERE allowed. I'm not so sure now, though. They've changed their FAQ, making it far shorter and less detailed. It no longer mentions personal servers.

    But I still think they'd be worth a call.
  • I've had service with Concentric for about 6 months now, and have been very pleased. They have a 'Home Office' package: 4 static IPs, 784K/416K, $69/mo. Running servers is permitted.
    --
  • In all seriousness, one of the best ISPs I have found, but it is local to the Dallas, Texas area is Directlink.net. They offer everything including subnets in 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, or even an entire class C if you need it. They will also give you DNS (Reverse) delegation if you need it on any of these. I have a residential package at 768k/128k (down/up), 8-ip subnet, delegation, and I am running a web server that offers "free" webhosting services and email services off it. One day when I called technical support they didn't complain when I told them what I was doing either. If you live in Dallas and you can get a DSL line through GTE or Southwestern Bell, directlink.net will probably be your best choice =)
  • If you're getting a good upload (server) rate. That's probably less than you'd pay for an hour of on-site service from a backbone provider. You can run a 'server' from just about any DSL service, the big question is how well will it work?

    I've got standard BAnet DSL at 50 bucks a month, and I get 640/128 speeds and a static IP. This isn't fast enough on the upload to serve. It makes sense from an economic standpoint though. My download speeds are a little under half of a T1 (which isn't really acurate since most T-1's handle more than one computers connections) at about 1/30th of the price. Upload is about 1/12th the speed at 1/30th the price.

    At some point in time, this hits a T-1, T-3 or something that hits the internet which does have to get paid for. For example, BAnet seems to hit a Quest backbone that they need to pay for. They probably have some sort of volume discount, but they still spend alot of what you're paying just to be able to tie into the net.

    Obviously, if you can't afford 120 bucks a month, you can't afford it, but I don't think it's unreasonable if you're getting at least 384kb upload speed and a static IP address.
  • I've set up my own webserver using cable, they block the ports 1024, and the rest they scan frequently... But there is something called "PortSentry" that detects when someone scans your ports, and completely hides them from the scanner, turning your ip in a sort of black hole... Very nice indeed! ;-)
  • I can also recommend Speakeasy [speakeasy.org]. I've been with them for 10 months now and since they've added the NYC POP, have had very few problems (and most of those seem to be with COVAD rather than Speakeasy). Last time I looked at their terms of service it was basically no porn servers, no chat servers and they reserve the right to convert you to a commercial account if your bandwidth gets out of hand. Plus they'll give you multiple static IP addresses. As for those saying "just do it", I know that MediaOne in the Boston area not only does port scans, but also locks the connection to the MAC address of the network card requiring a phone card if you want to upgrade your machine (to a NAT server for instance!) And remember that just because the ISP lets you get away with it for now, once they've picked all of the "low hanging fruit", the next easiest source of money may be forced commercial upgrades.
  • Most services don't actually check if you are running a server or not. You could probably get away with one on most DSL services.

    There's always that FAWKING DSL!!! You could try clicking on the Slashdot banner ads.
  • Is it just in the Montreal's area where the upload speed is limited to 15k/sec for both cable (Videotron) and DSL (Bell)? This is extremely lame, and both can't provides a serious technical reason to this.

    Of course, there's a mention that no personnal server is supposed to be running, but hey, there's no mention that the upload speed is limited to 15k/sec. So I used to host my server (web, ftp) from videotron. I recently cancelled my account however (i moved).

    Furthermore, Videotron is charging extras if you download more than 6 gigs/month, or 1 gig in upload. Things are getting a little bit harder if you wish to run a server with this shitty, oops, sorry, i meant monopoliptic provider.

    There's only 2 providers of high speed internet access to home customers in Montreal, bring a few more please.

  • I asked a person at flashcom [flashcom.com] and they said they really didn't care. But from their Terms and Conditions, it looks like they don't like anyone even using NAT, which I find very hard to believe. It's funny that they didn't mention web servers, but I guess they don't want you providing access to lots of other people (their business DSL is $100/month vs $40 for personal).

    6. Restrictions. HomeSurfer Customers agree not to run any servers in conjunction with the Services, including but not limited to, electronic mail, NAT, DHCP and DNS servers. In the event any HomeSurfer Customer attempts to utilize a server on the network
  • <<I'm with Megapath right now.. While the service is ok, they just *today* sent me an e-mail that they were raising the prices. It's now $79/mo for 144k iDSL, (which is all I can get in my area) which is too high for my liking. >>

    That's because PacBell charges them so much for the line. Remember that to get IDSL, you have to have an ISDN line. It was a losing deal for them. It probably still is.

    PacBell charges less for a "normal" grade phone line used for ADSL/SDSL...

    <<I'm shopping around for another DSL provider as I type. >>

    I doubt you'll find a better situation. Everyone has to go through PacBell. (or whoever your regional baby bell is...)

    <<If you can foot the bill Megapath is nice.. but it's creeping up towards business class DSL pricing that others offer.>>

    Didn't they *lower* prices for ADSL/SDSL at the same time that they raised IDSL prices?

    -JF

  • I really like my cable provider, nyc road runner. My only problem with them is that they have dynamic IPs. I used dhs's 2y.net domain to register my server to a dns name. I created an shellscript to automatically go to dhs' homepage and update their dns name to my IP.

    If anyone wishes to have the script, please mail me.
  • Consists of Telocity [telocity.com] DSL protected via Linux Router Project Materhorn [plain.co.nz] running on a 486DX-66.

    All my internal boxes (including a roommates win98 machine) are masqueraded through my LRP router. I forward ssh, http/https, and smtp to an internal box, so my web server is publicly accessible, and I can receive my own mail (I use Qmail [qmail.org]).

    I also used the Public DNS [granitecanyon.com] service to provide forward DNS for 0xd6.org, which goes to my network at home. One bad thing about Telocity is that because they're swamped with tech support, etc., they won't delagate reverse DNS. For my simple home setup, I don't care.

    This setup has been up and running for the last few months, I have also assisted a friend and my mother in getting this going. All you need is Telocity and a cheap 486 with two NICs and you're ready to go.

    About telocity:
    It took about a month from ordering Telocity to having our service installed. My friend and mother's installation went fine but I had a few minor quirks which were easily solved by Telocity (i.e. they knew what the problem was and fixed it themselves). As I mentioned before, Telocity's one true failing is technical support. Be prepared to spend hours waiting to get a human, this is due to the fact that Telocity has many users in many cities. But as for running your own network, Telocity doesn't care what you do as long as you don't do anything commercial. In fact, we were told that our service was limited to 768k down/384k up, but in actuality Telocity doesn't limit up (I've gotten 768k consistently) and they're rate-limiting software doesn't work as well as they thought, because I've gotten over 900k downloading before my speeds started dropping. The moral of this story is: get telocity and go nuts with your setup. Make sure that you protect your network.

    Marcus

  • It seems to me that the only reason for not allowing servers it the potential for hogging bandwidth. This is completely ludicrous because they should not sell you the bandwidth of a DSL line if they do not expect you to use it.

    They should allow you to put whatever the hell you want at the other end, and just charge for the bandwidth you actually use. Then it wouldn't matter.

  • CO-LO hosting might be more what you need.
    Many places charge for the hosting by the amount of bandwidth you want.
    If you just want a little bandwidth then CO-LO will cost you less and be more dependable than DSL.
    Plus with CO-LO you don't need to wory about utilities for the computer like AC and power.

    -----
    If my facts are wrong then tell me. I don't mind.
  • Get a cheap DSL/Cable line, keep constant watching of your ip address and run your servers. The ISP will be none the wiser. Most of these DSL/Cable ISP's are run on a shoestring when it comes to technical smarts. I run IIS 5 off of my CM and it does fine. So I shut up and quietly set it up. My web site it run straight off my home machine. I too got the big song and dance about their commercial line. There are lots of places that will do domain rerouting for you. Some for a charge, others for free. Works great in our case. Hope this helps! Kirch

  • Megapath is pretty good... (Score:3)

    by jfrisby ( 21563 ) on Saturday July 01, 2000 @07:01PM (#963467) Homepage
    MegaPath [megapathdsl.net] has a distinction between personal and commercial accounts, however personal accounts can be used to run servers. You cannot use the server for commercial purposes however. That means no banner ads, e-commerce, etc...

    Even when I had a personal account they were quite friendly helping me set up my domain name and the like...

    -JF

  • Cable modem blues... (Score:3)

    by theBSOD ( 190998 ) on Saturday July 01, 2000 @08:51PM (#963468)

    The Road Runner cable modems here in Georgia were great for a while, but soon they started playing tricks with their routers. I'm not an expert when it comes to routing TCP/IP, but here's what I understand: blocking ports is easy (duh... that's what a firewall does), but there is also some way of giving bandwidth precedence as well.

    I knew people that used to tele-commute from home because they could get just at much work done telnetting in from their house as they could working in the office. Then RR worked their voodoo on the routing and telnet got so slow that the servers would time them out before they could even log in. It seems the best bandwitdh is coming in... and it is mainly the web ports. Going back upstream is usually only about 100K if you're lucky. Downloading is still extremely fast, but anything back upstream is very limited.

    The explanation that was given to the people that I work with was that certain RR customers were operating "illegal servers" in violation of the service contract. Instead of eliminating problem users and/or bandwidth hogs, they just set up the system so that all upstream traffic would be limited to certain speeds and rarely used services (such as FTP and telnet) would also have their bandwidth limited. Okay, my parents my not ever telnet or even know what FTP stands for, but what about someone like me? I guess I'll have to get a business DSL connection just to get decent service.

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