For a few years, I had paid hosting, but I realized that I wasn’t getting much out of the 5 bucks per month that I paid for it.  The traffic I got (and still get) just doesn’t justify even the lowest bandwidth tier provided by most web hosts.  Instead, I run this domain on a NAS drive in my apartment and I point all the DNS records to the IP of the drive.

I debated the pros and cons of paid vs. self hosting for awhile before I settled on hosting everything myself.  Unless I get a serious amount of traffic, it just isn’t worth the money to me when I can just run the whole thing on my own.  However, after manually updating the DNS records for my domain thanks to a service outage and new IP address assignment, I’m starting to wonder.

There are a few problems with self-hosting.  First, service outages are a real pain, especially in the summer.  The IT guys schedule weekend maintenance quite often in the summer and take the whole network offline for hours at a time.  Power outages due to storms compound this and even an uninterruptible power supply may not prevent any storm-related service outages.  Second, my IP address changes occasionally (usually due to the maintenance outages) and I have to update the DNS records.  This makes for even more downtime since it may take awhile before I realize that the IP has changed.  Lastly, I’m running this on a NAS, which makes access times pretty slow.  If you’ve wondered why it takes awhile for the page to load, this is why.  Sometimes the system will unspool the hard drive when it hasn’t been accessed in awhile, so it can take several seconds to spool back up and process the incoming page requests.  This, on top of the fact that the machine can just barely run Apache/PHP/MySQL.

The good thing about self-hosting is that it’s free with no bandwidth restrictions.  I can post as many massive pictures and videos as I want and it doesn’t matter.  I can use the domain name and the NAS as a massive storage archive accessible from anywhere.  I have complete control over the system and its configuration, so if I want something installed, I can do it without begging a hosting company to provide some feature (e.g. few hosts I know of provide Subversion repositories).  Of course I also have to take responsibility to ensure everything is managed properly so that someone doesn’t install a rootkit and/or deface the site.

So the balance between noticeable downtime and no restrictions continues.  For now, it’s acceptable, but I wonder if people ever get disappointed when they can’t get to my blog.  Probably not.