Re: [LUG] Looking for old hardware

1. My data is owned and controlled by somebody else. As has already happened, a cloud provider went bust, businesses relying on them lost access to their data. Add to that the risk of confidentiality being exposed and you have a fairly dangerous situation as far as control and access goes.

Your data ought to be owned by you - even if it is controlled by someone else. If your chosen remote hosting service claims ownership of it, then dump them.

If the company goes bankrupt, as more and more are doing as they shave margins in a very competitive market, the distinction is irrelevant. Even without that, you have no idea if they are looking at your data or mining it for nefarious purposes. You are forced to trust a random provider with your business - and to me, that does not make good business sense. Backups need a second teir-1 internet link too, no good trying to do it locally on poor links and a lot of data, even if you try to squeeze it through at night.

Seriouly. Fuckem. If they need Internet then get Internet - and don't fuck about with pissy little consumer grade "broadband". Anyone, anywhere can get a leased line. They just need to pay for it, and if a company of 10+ people can't afford a 10Mb leased line then they're not taking their business seriously. My latest clients just gotten 100Mb symetric with no contention to the edge of the ISPs network.

Have you ever priced a 10mb dedicated to a site that is 10km from the exchange? (I have sites 7, 9, 10km and 13km away) Some scary figures start to appear even 1km away. And that's if you can find anyone that wants to do it...

And don't get me started on satellite or 3g...

The last 10Mb line I had instlled for a client cost them nothing for install (virgin media fibre) and £450 a month from the ISP (not Virgin, obiously) that is on a 100Mb bearer too, so they can go up to 100Mb at the flick of a button when they need it. They also get a small IPv4 subnet and a big IPv6 subnet, of-course.

Sure, and that's nice. But that's a 20-fold increase in rent, and like I say, installation outside of towns is impractical. Reliability of consumer grade adsl is *good*, even in my remote sites, and contention with Zen at least is negligable at our maximum speeds.

So running your own server in a data centre works - as long as your clients are prepared to pay for it, but people seem to want cheap these days, or think they're entitled to "superfast" broadband without actualy paying for it, or undestanding the implications of contention, etc.

Putting your hardware in a datacentre doesn't resolve local poor speed issues - unless your business is world-facing on the IT side, of course. (Which is why I rent a VM in Telehouse for our websites)

There is no "One size fits all" approach to IT and business.