Steve suggested: > I used to host a lot of stuff at home, but honestly, even with a T1 and a > cable modem, it wasn't worth it. The important stuff I put someplace > reliable, so that I don't have to worry about the last mile nearly as much.
In my own experience, I moved from a Comcast residential DOCSIS-2 connection in Cambridge (2000-2012) to an Astound Broadband DOCSIS-3 connection in San Francisco (since 2012). Astound's network was built by RCN, and sold off a few years ago. Honestly, at this point the epitome of price/performance is a race between DOCSIS-3 and FIOS. But I think a whole lot more construction is taking place with DOCSIS-3 than FIOS, probably because there are several companies using it whereas only one company supports FIOS. DOCSIS-3 has the advantage of lower cost: it's exceedingly expensive to run fiber to every end-point, whereas running RG-6 from a pole-mounted fiber box to several nearby buildings is quite inexpensive. At $50/mo for a 55-megabit down/5 megabit-up connection that simply NEVER goes down, I don't see the point in "business"-class service. I don't get to control the PTR record but it really doesn't matter. If I want a stable end-point, I'm going to use an encrypted VPN anyway. I'm not ever going to use a service that attempts to authenticate my origin based on a DNS entry, and filtering by origin-IP is at best a secondary line of defense. As for stability of "dynamic" IP addresses: I've had the same IP for two years and counting with Astound, and with Comcast I recall one stretch of about 7 years without any change. My personal domains are hosted from home, on a pair of servers configured for load-balanced HA the same as anything I do for a workplace. (One of the earlier suggestions was to run a pair of connections for improved outage resilience, but unless you go full-on BGP I don't think you'll achieve it for inbound services so you might as well put inbound services at a proper hosting provider.) My personal domains don't require more than 3-nines availability, which my current setup provides. Astound's consumer-grade service is a tad nicer than Comcast's in one area: Comcast does port blocking (including the all-important port 80), and as near as I can tell, Astound doesn't block anything. I briefly had RCN before 2000, they didn't port-block at that time but I don't know what their policy is now. I'm actually surprised the consumer-grade services provide a stable public IP address to each customer, in this era of NAT, at a time when 99.9% of customers wouldn't even notice the lack of inbound reachability. I think even the cell-phone providers give you a public IP whenever you're connected. Either I've been lucky with my consumer-grade services, or I'm just less picky because I know that when I pay less, I have no expectation of being able to reach a clueful support staff person. Service quality has been robust, so that made all the difference at my home addresses. -rich _______________________________________________ bblisa mailing list [email protected] http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
