Google Fiber Partially Reverses Server Ban 169
Lirodon writes "After being called out by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for banning the loosely-defined use of "servers" on its Fiber service, Google appears to have changed its tune, and now allows 'personal, non-commercial use of servers that complies with this AUP is acceptable, including using virtual private networks (VPN) to access services in your home and using hardware or applications that include server capabilities for uses like multi-player gaming, video-conferencing, and home security.'"
i got a question (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:i got a question (Score:5, Informative)
No.
http://googlefiberblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/some-clarification-for-small-businesses.html [blogspot.com]
Yay! In-home small business is OK. (Score:3)
The linked site says that it's OK to use the fiber for business if you're running a "small" business FROM YOUR HOME.
Terms-of-use cut is whether you LIVE there (apparently as a primary residence, not camping out at the office) rather than the site being an office-only.
I suspect they might waffle if you set up the next e-bay/facebook/netflix class service in your back room. But for people like me, with a consulting business, it would be just fine - and explicitly allowed - to use the fiber for mail service,
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Glad to see Google is subsidizing the office costs for large corporations before helping entrepreneurs gain some economic advantage.
Happy to see this, for two reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
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Sadly, they're not likely to reduce the amount of traffic sniffing.
Google Fiber doesn't sniff traffic.
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+1 Funny
Do you have any evidence to the contrary? At all?
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Because they have all the right taps in place (Score:2)
All this means is that they've implemented the infrastructure needed to intercept and decode your traffic.
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Not exactly. While I'm not saying they don't, this does not prove they do.
Something as simple as looking at their logs to see you've been transferring several TB per month is enough to tell them something is going on.
Ideally, this would be the extent of the cotrols - low volume stuff that people typically use wouldn't register (or wouldn't seem extraordinary) and they'd quickly spot some smartass trying to run an ISP.
Freedom of Speech / Freedom to Listen? (Score:2)
I feel like if the founding fathers had been born when I was, they would have known that "freedom to listen" on port 80 is just as important as "freedom of speech."
What difference does it make if I'm using a home connection to promote my political ideas? The exceptions listed do nothing to benefit freedom of speech. You pay for home internet, and then they want to ding you again to serve up your ideas on Port 80. Why don't they just give you a NAT'ed address and be done with it forever.
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This is probably one of the reasons for server ban clauses these days — if they do decide to go to carrier-grade NAT rather than, say, actually getting IPv6 working, then they can dismiss complaints of breakage with "you shouldn't have been running a server anyway"...
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Which is what my ISP did. And they're damned proud of it, too. Even have a webpage dedicated to telling people how awesome and safe this whole NATing thing is. A big problem is that the tier 1 techs have no idea what that even means. I reckon they have to have some incentive to resolve issues themselves as opposed to escalating tickets because they fight tooth and nail to hold onto your issue, even if they're not authorized to resolve
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OK sure. Take a random sample of 100 people on the street and see how many make it back to your webpage when you tell them to visit "spire dot net colon 9000"
Impediments such as this placed in the way of free speech are in fact prior restraint on free speech. I suppose you think it's OK to have mandatory voter IDs too?
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RANT: it's not internet access (Score:5, Insightful)
Any provider that bans "servers" is not providing internet access. They are providing media consumption access. They should be forced to very clearly differentiate that as a type of service provided.
Internet access is unconstainted IP packets. Both TCP and UDP and whatever other protocol you want.
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Believe it or not there are shades of grey between "completely unfettered use of the connection" and "I am ter conumar", and properly discussing this issue would probably benefit from understanding the kinds of distinctions involved.
Few want internet access (Score:3)
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Any provider that bans "servers" is not providing internet access. They are providing media consumption access.
And this is all the MAFIAA is willing to allow. The tiny portion of Internet users who believe any other use is even possible, let alone useful, would fit comfortably on the campus of your average US land-grant university.
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Internet access is unconstainted IP packets. Both TCP and UDP and whatever other protocol you want.
Since pretty much all residental connections I know of block outgoing port 25 I don't think most of the world has "internet access" the way you define internet access. Good luck in your quest to redefine it.
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Internet access is unconstainted IP packets. Both TCP and UDP and whatever other protocol you want.
Since pretty much all residental connections I know of block outgoing port 25
Google Fiber doesn't.
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CenturyLink does by default but you can get them to allow it. Clear allows it. I think the GP is a bit... confused, and thinks that Comcast = "pretty much all residential connections". No, thank you!
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I disagree. They definitely provide the user with unrestricted access to the Internet, however they don't claim to provide the Internet with access to the user.
Look up the dictionary definition of access then explain which definition you're trying to use to justify your statement.
What's the use of a pipe that big? (Score:3)
If you can't run servers on it? I can't imagine using even a fraction of that unless I'm running some kinds of servers out of my house.
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Porn. Massive amounts of all-I-can-possibly-see (until I go blind from it) porn downloaded or streamed at glorious speeds. ;-)
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Meanwhile in Overland Park (Score:2)
If you were ever interested in running for city council or mayor, this may be your year [dslreports.com].
Two weeks after OP balked at Google Fiber they approved it, only to have Google withdraw the offer. OP will now be the island of "no gigabit" in a sea of Internet.
What can a home server be used for (Score:2)
These are all potential applications that could be enabled by Home Server Applications. These require good security. But "Why can't we make secure apps?". And yes you can do all this now. It is just not as easy as it could be.
a) Why can't I have my own "facebook" Why do my pictures have to be uploaded to a webserver with dubious terms of use that are subject to modification at any time. My own server would allow access only to my friends and totally controll my content among that group.
b) Google Drive, with
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My point is that the internet is more than a replacement for Cable TV. It can be so much more if we use it for all that it can do. And the ISP's are limiting the ability to expand the functionality of the internet by limiting its uses which means business are not going to start up supporting the other functions.
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Same as most ISPs have and for the same reason. The big difference was google did a lot of fighting specifically against that kinda thing.
Haven't actually read the new TOS, but from summary this sounds reasonable enough.
Realistically this is usually how this ends up actually working with most ISPs anyway. I've yet to hear of an ISP cutting off someones connection for running a minecraft server.
It still contrasts the "bit are bits" argument, but my pragmatic side is willing to accept that we may need an arti
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OTOH, if you do host a web page, I bet Google will have no problem indexing i, and showing Ads along side search result hits......
Re:server ban? (Score:5, Informative)
It's just boilerplate legal speak put into the contracts. It was never meant to ban what they are explicitly excluding now, it was just put in to differentiated between commercial and residential service. They wanted a line in the contract to throw at you if you abused to the service for commercial use, so far as I know no one was ever booted by their ISP for running a VPN or hosting a multi-player game (though occasionally their networks settings made it difficult to do things).
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so far as I know no one was ever booted by their ISP for running a VPN or hosting a multi-player game (though occasionally their networks settings made it difficult to do things).
The second reason for a written ban was so that when you complained that their network settings were making it difficult to run your multi-player game server, they could say "you aren't supposed to be doing that" and they could ignore you, instead of waste, I means expend, engineer time fixing it.
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That's what happens with overcommits in the hundreds to one.
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Yeah. I vote we fix that. Everyone should pay 100x what they are now, and we'll get that fixed right up. Where can I send your new bill to?
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First tell me what the ACTUAL offer is and we'll let the market decide who gets to send me a bill. Be sure to implement a proper queueing system so we can both be sure you're giving me what you offer.
But note that municipal internet has already proven that I can get twice as much for half the price while you still turn a profit so if you want to be in the running, your pricing should reflect that.
Be sure to deduct the big fat subsidies you already got for building out infrastructure.
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It's more a way to make residential users think they're getting a lot more than they really are and pursing 'value based*' pricing.
Specifically, offer unlimited with big speed ratings knowing very well that the whole thing will come crashing down if they actually (god forbid) use even a fraction of what is offered.
Then ban anything that might actually cause a user to use a significant amount of what they have paid for. At the time it started, that was servers. As long as they didn't have a server, they woul
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Same deal for DSL.
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Re:server ban? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe so, but Comcast cut off my friend for running a low-volume mail server. The definition of "server" is intentionally left vague in the TOS. That allows the ISPs to single out users for any reason they want, without having to be specific or consistent.
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Kind of pointless these days to run a mail server on a consumer connection anyway. No major email delivery system trusts IP's that are known to be dynamically assigned (easily determined by reverse DNS patterns).
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Some of us run servers that receive mail.
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As I used to. My previous ISP blocked port 25 outbound which is fine, since there were so many spam bots out there. My current one is blocking port 25 inbound, which is just plain pointless. Thankfully, Google Apps were still free and I'm using them as a glorified port redirector.
You were saying low-volume and you have no control over inbound - so I made the likely assumption. Of course technically outbound email is a client connection, but most of that's usually done by MTA servers acting as clients a
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Fine? How do you send emails with a blocked port 25? Some server don't support TLS, so you can't use 587, you need to stick to plain-text/port 25.
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A lot of servers will even do plain text over 587 and 80 and 8080 and 2525.
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Most people running mail servers at home use their ISP's SMTP servers [wikipedia.org] to send outgoing mail while receiving mail directly. This lets the ISP watch for (and control) spammy customers while still allowing the customers to manage everything else themselves.
Comcast has recently been cracking down on residential customers that do this, even if there is no spam involved. In many regions, they've started blocking inbound port 25, which has nothing to do with blocking spam.
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Except now many ISP's won't even relay mail that isn't from the ISP domain.
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Maybe so, but Comcast cut off my friend for running a low-volume mail server.
If you're on Comcast, get a business connection. Then they help you and don't complain. Yes, it's slightly more expensive, but only slightly.
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Actually, since it's the rate that causes congestion, it should be sold by rate.
Even better, it should use a fair queue where each user is allocated a committed rate (however small) with some reasonable burst and the ability to borrow unused bandwidth fairly.
The ISPs don't want to do that because the effective committed rate (what they could provide if everyone was trying to max out at once) is embarrassingly tiny. Also because then there would be a meaningful number that potential customers could judge the
Re:server ban? (Score:5, Interesting)
It still contrasts the "bit are bits" argument, but my pragmatic side is willing to accept that we may need an artificial tier in there to keep prices low for non-business users.
I don't. Google's wholesale cost for ip transit is probably around $6 per terabyte - wholesale cost was about $12 a year ago and its been falling by 50% for the last 4-5 years.
If they are worried about losing money, then set a threshold like 5TB/month and then start charging wholesale plus minimum necessary mark-up for anything over that.
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You sound like you don't know what you are talking about because wholesale suppliers typically charge per the amount of bandwidth available, not the amount actually downloaded. For example a 1Mbps link of UNCONTENDED bandwidth might cost $400 per month, regardless of whether it is utilised or not. It is then up to the ISP to share it among all their customers at a ratio that is not noticeable slow. To Limit the link from being saturated by all customers using it at once they put in certain restrictions desi
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Yes.
"For example a 1Mbps link of UNCONTENDED bandwidth might cost $400 per month, regardless of whether it is utilised or not."
On average it is more like $5/MB, for Google much much much less. You could manage to pay $400 for 2MB if you were at the absolute bottom of the purchasing scale.
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I have no idea where you are, but here, even in small quantities it's in the $10-$20 per Mbps and falls fast as quantity goes up.
There is typically a loop charge if you can't meet the provider in their facility, but Google owns fiber everywhere.
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A T1 is irrelevant for an ISP these days. Nobody uses them for that. The $400 is mostly loop charges and those are irrelevant when you already own fiber to the IX.
But I meant to respond to the AC above.
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I assume it was a reference to the price of a T1 link... which isn't really relevant when we are talking about Google... or anyone else really in the modern age. A small branch that would have once used a T1 is better off using the local broadband connection. Get the telco flavor plus the cable flavor if you are that worried about availability.
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Do you have reliable sources for that number?
No he doesn't, because there are no reliable sources. Any time you go out to purchase bandwidth you sit down and talk to a sales rep from the company who you're looking to buy from, you tell them what you're looking for, when, and where, and they prepare a quote for you.
The actual cost of the bandwidth varies a LOT, based on a wide variety of factors. What's the physical distance between endpoints? Are you buying dark fiber? An ethernet circuit? A wave circuit? Do you want protection? What kind of uptime/SL
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Do you have reliable sources for that number?
http://www.dslprime.com/dslprime/42-d/4830-internet-transit-costs-down-50-in-last-year [dslprime.com]
I did the math to convert units from the way ip transit is priced to the way most isp users think about it.
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Google likely pays far less than $0.60 megabit on average, because they're handling large amounts of traffic through public and private peering arrangements. They've got their own fibre to get data to the appropriate public IX. For example, all my traffic to/from Google goes through TorIX, regardless of if I'm talking to a Google service or a Google Fibre customer. Many of the local server and colocation providers are also connected to TorIX or QIX.
Home user uploads (Score:2)
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But far less than sending all those same photos and videos directly to your friends and family..
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so they can sell business access at more expensive price. you didn't seriously think that they were just acting as a dumb pipe providing you bandwidth to use as you see fit?
though nowadays when actual definitions between server and client can be a bit murky it's a bit finicky. playing certain games online? well, you may or you may not be a server..
another reason is that they can cut off people who actually use the bandwidth, just because they advertise xx MB/s doesn't really mean they're prepared to provide
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It's not "nowadays" it was baked into the internet from day one. It's a peer-to-peer network where it's expected that a node may appear as a server in one context and a client in the next. These clauses are only written into ISP contracts with an eye to forcing residential customers who generate 'too much' traffic to pay more for business, but once that tool is there in the contract it's only a matter of time before it is used more generally. And it makes no sense. They should just define specifically what
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That right there is the whole thing in a nutshell.
On the other hand, I'm a little bit sympathetic to "make the thing first, then work out the details" because if I had to hammer out every detail, every contingency of the things I do before I do them, I'd never get anything done.
However, when you get the size of Google and have that
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no, 100 Mbit at a time , but not all the time (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not a matter of 100 Mbps or 25 Mbps.
You can download something at 100 Mbps and in ten seconds you'll be done. Your neighbor can then use that SAME 100 Mbps of capacity for a few seconds. So you, your neighbor, and 98 other people all get 100 Mbps when you want it. At 100 Mbps, it takes you a lot longer to read a web page than it does to load it, and a lot longer to listen to a song than to download it. You use zero Mbps when you're sleeping, at work, running errands, cooking dinner - overall you use the bandwidth about 1% of the time.
Compare that to if eBay connected their servers to Google fiber connections. Servers would be using the bandwidth all the time. It couldn't be shared with neighbors, so Google would need to add dedicated capacity just for those servers. That costs alot more to have it all to yourself versus sharing with 99 other people.
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The logical fallacy in your statement is that servers do not use 100% of the bandwidth all the time. There is no service that i'm aware of that will use a full 1gbit link 100% of the time. If i put up a moderate website, i doubt that'll get more than 1 gigabyte of traffic a month. That equates to ~10 seconds of full speed on a gigabit connection. I'm fairly sure google can spare 10 seconds out of 2678400 seconds in a month for a simple website. Even if it's a terrabyte of traffic (year right), that's 9
rotfl. Never _seen_ a server, have you? (Score:3)
> If i put up a moderate website, i doubt that'll get more than 1 gigabyte of traffic a month.
We did 600 GB - in 1997, before there was any video on the web. A GB is 1/4th of a DVD iso.
Our "half server" plans include a terabyte for each of the two customers on a server. (Meaning 2TB per 1U server.)
One guy I work with - one guy, working out of his house, has a site that never drops below 100 Mbps. It peaks at around 400 Mbps.
> servers do not use 100% of the bandwidth all the time. There is no
Re:rotfl define a server (Score:2)
You're talking commercial leased vms and such. If an entrepreneur wants to start his own company and hosts a website on his home computer, what's the harm in that? Besides it being against the TOS, he's using minimal bandwidth. If i created a song and hosted it on my home computer and even it was popular and got downloaded a million times, it's still low bandwidth.
So in your scenario, if a hosting company or a data center moved to oklahoma city to save on bandwidth/connection costs by using google fibre,
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The logical fallacy in your statement is that servers do not use 100% of the bandwidth all the time. There is no service that i'm aware of that will use a full 1gbit link 100% of the time. If i put up a moderate website, i doubt that'll get more than 1 gigabyte of traffic a month. That equates to ~10 seconds of full speed on a gigabit connection. I'm fairly sure google can spare 10 seconds out of 2678400 seconds in a month for a simple website. Even if it's a terrabyte of traffic (year right), that's 9000 seconds of that 2678400 in a month. You'd have to transfer ~300 terrabytes of traffic to utilize it 100%.
I guess if you run a torrent site and allowed full bandwidth with unlimited connections you could use a bunch of that bandwidth, but then again, you don't need a server to run that. You're also limited to the bandwidth on the opposite side.
Lol, I know of many services that would use a 1tb/sec connection at 100% of the bandwidth all the time. You are just thinking too small, and vastly underestimate what people will try given the chance.
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That's what bursting and borrowing is for in a fair queuing setup. You define a commit. Then you define a burst, then you make the bandwidth borrowable.
Everyone gets their fair share of the available pipe. If few are using it, you get to use more (since an unused pipe is just as expensive as a utilized one) and you have a bit of burst so you can get a nice snappy response when you browse the web but can't damage other's network performance.
Once that is set up, it doesn't matter one bit how you actually use
How many times faster than dial up is that? (Score:2)
> That's what bursting and borrowing is for in a fair queuing setup. You define a commit. Then you define a burst, then you make the bandwidth borrowable.
Sure, you, me and Linus can sign up for that. Normally, broadband is advertised as "30 times faster than dial-up, 50X faster than dial-up"
because most home users don't know what a Mbps is. Hell, half the WEBMASTERS we have as customers say their office service is "x megaBYTES".
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no, they're acting as a dumb pipe so you can use bandwidth for more youtube and gmail and all that other stuff. also, instead of just recording your actions on some websites, they can record your actions 24x7 and link it to a real person, not just an online profile. profit!
they provide it to browse ebay, not BE ebay. share (Score:2)
They provide X Mbps for a few seconds at a time.
For example, a page on eBay might be 5 Mb and take one second to load, that's 5 Mbps. When you're not loading a page, another customer is using that bandwidth. A residential user might be downloading 1% of the time, so 50Mbps of capacity serves 100 users at about 50 Mbps.
On the other hand, a popular server is serving customers approximately 100% of the time. No-one else can share that bandwidth since the server is constantly using it. Therefore, server bandw
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I often wonder why anybody would want to run a commercial business venture off a home connection.
Probably not intentionally. I have a friend that started up a small consulting business in his spare time. He initially just used a FTP server to provide completed project files to his very small customer base (it started off as 3 people). After about six years he's pretty well doing his consulting full time, he had to hire on someone to help out with paper work and data entry and is now looking at having a commercial server since he's dealing with nearly a hundred clients. It's still not a big start up, bu
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Cost, convenience and inertia. Most small businessmen, once they've learned a procedure and are comfortable with it, have no interest in learning an entirely different (and more expensive and less convenient) way of doing the same thing. What they have works, and they're busy running their remodeling or dry cleaning business. Why would they want to change?
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For small business, it would make a huge amount of sense. Server down at three A.M. Would you rather stay up and fix it in your living room or trudge to the colo facility.?
Would you rather rent expensive rack space or use an unoccupied room in your house for free? Buy rackmount gear or put your old tower to use?
Some people need a server but don't have the need (or delusion of need) for 27000 nines uptime.
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For one, seizure of data meets a much higher standard. Then, try comparing the cost of storage vs. cloud rental and the cost of home-hosting vs. data-center hosting.
If you don't need a fat pipe and do need lots of storage, hiring it out is expensive. If you care about privacy, it's hideously expensive.
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Why would you host a server at home? It's much cheaper to go colo as you'll pay significantly less per Mbps (Google fiber is an exception to this, every other home broadband option is several times more per Mbps). No it's so they can charge you "business" rates if you're doing anything but being a consumption bot.
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Many reasons. You may want to have a web cam, temperature station or other local data source connected to the net*. You may want to host a game server. A number of applications effectively act as servers even though they're really just applications in practice.
And at least where I am, you never pay per Mb for wired internet. I just pay an extra $10 (or thereabouts) per month to get a fixed IP address from my provider, and I can use it for anything non-commercial.
* Why? For fun.
Why run a server at home (Score:5, Informative)
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Sorry, I should have been more specific, why would you want to run a high bandwidth commercial server at home? Residential lines have by FAR the highest $/Mbps of any kind of line outside of T1/DS3 with SLA's, bulk transport is FAR cheaper to buy at a colo.
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There's lots of reasons not to -- power, network connectivity, etc.
I suspect that actual commercial server hosting happens by accident, a small consulting or partnership that just needs basic access to get off the ground (FTP, test web site, etc) and it just grows from there.
Although considering I pay $79 per month for Comcast business class internet with unlimited throughput, I don't think there is any colo option cheaper than that that's not a grossly oversubscribed low-budget VPS.
Re:server ban? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I would think rickety old XP boxes run by the clueless would be at least as much of a problem.
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There was a server ban? What for?
Yes and No.
Yes, in that saying "No servers" is standard for any residential TOS from any ISP.
No, in that almost nobody actually enforces the ban on "servers" for things like VPN's, remote access, personal "servers" for things like playing games, and other small-scale things which could still be called a "server".
Yes, in that you can't run any kind of commercial-grade type server, business use server, etc.
Kudos to Google for actually changing the language of the TOS, instead of relying on a "gentleman's agre
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yes, they are, RTFA. They are restricting commercial servers. Type of use is part of network neutrality. In true network neutrality, a packet is a packet without regard to protocol or purpose.
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You mean someone who actually knows what something is? I can see why that could be terribly inconvenient to politicians and marketers.
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One of the company executives actually came in to work one day.
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Sigh. I want to pay just for what I use, just like in the old days. To hell with these complicated terms and conditions which are only fair to google.
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This has nothing to do with running a server. It's all about bandwidth and nothing but bandwidth. They are giving you gigabit as a PEAK capability, not as a continuous rate. What they should do is specify the limits of their service in those terms like the maximum amount of data you can transfer in one second, one minute, one hour, one day, etc.
The reality is, most people will be downloading. That means most of the usage is in one direction. They will have plenty of capacity in the other direction.