Why didn’t anyone tell me…

For about 3 years I ran my own web and email server. Someone generously gave me a copy of Mac OS X Server, so I bought a Mac Mini and started my life as a system administrator. The original intent (and from the features on the box) I was led to believe I could drop my Linksys firewall box and tell my ISP to skip the 5MB of web space, I’d be fine on my own thanks.

Well.

It turns out that OS X Server 10.4 didn’t want to serve DHCP over wireless ad-hoc networks, and if you use PPPOE to dial your modem, you can’t serve pretty much anything else. Static IPs only, thank you very much. Well, that meant I needed my Linksys box back, so that idea was shot. But I figured I could at least get a decent working spam filtration setup going. Instructions were difficult to find but in about a week I had what I wanted for email. I had to upgrade my local web server for some web things I wanted to do, but it was eventually done. But I hadn’t counted on a couple other things.

The novelty factor of having my own email and web server was not bad. I could create users and aliases at a whim with instant results. Uploading files to my web server was 100baseT! Neat! But… remote access was fraught with trouble. I needed DynDNS to point the world to my home server. I had to find the mac client (works great), configure it, set up the firewall, etc. But I also hadn’t counted on DSL downtime, aging modems and routers, power outages, security monitoring and intrusion (one guessed password in all that time, not bad). Plus powering and cooling the computer, and here’s the one that I really didn’t think much about: upgrading before it becomes insecure or unstable. New licences of OS X Server are $500 if I need the new features. Newer faster hardware to make the web email client usable means an additional $600 or more. Then powering it (the mac mini runs $12 a month under load – barely noticeable), but also cooling, backing up, and a million other small tasks.

Now a friend of mine pointed out DreamHost. For $100ish a year, someone does almost all that. I had to set up better spam filtering, but they do EVERYTHING ELSE for about what it would cost me in electricity alone, not counting the little cooling impact on my house. And they’re more often online, more aware and interested in all the little things that at this moment, I just want to work. So you know what? I don’t have any reservations about recommending these guys. They clean up the mess, they keep an eye on things, I just had to set up stronger spam filtering, and that’s been documented before me.

I still like OS X Server, but it’s not yet a practical home investment. I’d love to have a more reliable home connection and hardware that was speedier, but I can live with the shared risk of a hosted service for now.