Guys,
Here are some of the advantages of hosting at home:
– Total control of system, with exception of the Internet pipe coming
into your home.
– I have built outage detection tools that give me an immediate indication
when things may be down or awry. If you are with a hosted company,
the level of immediacy may not be there, since you are one of many
customers.
– I interface my webserver with back-end databases; namely SQL server
and Access. Try sharing a SQL Server environment on a hosted platform !
First of all, many will not do it. Secondly, for those who do, try and get
them to make a change to a system-like parameter (which effects its
other users) – good luck !
– No maximum download or storage thresholds to deal with, although this has
become much less of an issue over the years.
I am self-admittedly a control freak, and I have dealt with almost everything under the sun over the last 9 years. Yes, this includes DOS – and some bad one at that. However, over 9 years, I have built a very robust platform, that I am extremely comfortable with. I don’t have a default tolerant server – however, I have a second machine (which I keep up-to-date). Should my primary server go down, I can be back in business in less than 10 minutes.
But again, as others have reiterated, this is not an average task. If you are not technically-inclined, don’t even consider this option, IMO.