Commercial quality broadband at a residential address

eloy7

I want to set up a web server at my home (which is now my workplace too). For this, I need to have close to 100% uptime, which is only guaranteed for commercial broadband services. Particularly, as the quality of household internet connections has become an issue since the pandemic.

Is it possible to get commercial quality broadband for the commercial fee or is it limited to commercial places (possibly because of the infrastructure and services planned for commercial regions)?

unforeseen

You can get business broadband with SLAs for a normal house if you so wish and are happy to pay the price. Whether you will get a better service is anybody's guess as it is dependent on a lot of factors that paying the extra will not change such as quality of your line, loading at your exchange etc. 

Robin9

unforeseen said:

You can get business broadband with SLAs for a normal house if you so wish and are happy to pay the price. Whether you will get a better service is anybody's guess as it is dependent on a lot of factors that paying the extra will not change such as quality of your line, loading at your exchange etc. 

Agree with this - you don't get a better line, what you may well get is better telephone customer service and quicker repair appointments.

littleboo

You can pay for a leased line, expect one-off construction charges to get the circuit to your door and high monthly fees. Why don't you just host the web server in a hosting providers DC and let them worry about the infrastructure? Not sure that I'd agree that there is any general issue with domestic broadband performance since the pandemic, its worked remarkably well.

Neil_Jones

eloy7 said:

I want to set up a web server at my home (which is now my workplace too). For this, I need to have close to 100% uptime, which is only guaranteed for commercial broadband services. Particularly, as the quality of household internet connections has become an issue since the pandemic.

Is it possible to get commercial quality broadband for the commercial fee or is it limited to commercial places (possibly because of the infrastructure and services planned for commercial regions)?

I'm not aware that "the quality of household internet connections has become an issue since the pandemic".    Nobody will guarantee 100% uptime, but if you use a regular hosting provider that will offer 99.9% uptime (with suitable withdrawal slot courtesy of your wallet), then if they don't deliver, you can shout at them.

Setting up a web server at home isn't particularly difficult but you will pay more for "business" broadband than you would for home broadband.  The quality may not be any better but you would get dibs on line repairs/faults, and if you pay enough in the first place you can jump the entire queue.

onomatopoeia99

I use A&A Home::1 which like any product that runs over a telephone line does not come with an uptime guarantee, but does come from an ISP that does not oversell capacity on their links to get the price down (which leads to the "evening slowdowns" people on the cheap ISPs complain about) or skimp on technical support.  Downtime caused by them is exceedingly rare.  They also offer line bonding if you want the extra resilience having a second physical line to your house would provide.

From it I run servers on the following protocols : HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, SSH and SVN.  As well as a webserver, I run both the MXs for my email (own domain, obviously).  I do most of that as a hobby, it would probably be cheaper to set up a basic linux VM on Amazon EC2 compared to the electricity cost of running the server 24/7.

If you want an SLA with an uptime guarantee you're looking at a private circuit, because no ISP is going to pay out if your broadband goes down due someone driving an artic into a telegraph pole carrying the line from your house and it taking Openreach a week to fix it.. 

[Deleted User]

If you want close to 100% uptime for a web server at home you need more than just a good quality broadband connection and it will get very costly- you will need:

• Dual WAN with automatic failover
• Dual routers / gateways with automatic failover
• Dual independent power supplies with UPS capable of handling power outages lasting hours and/or backup generator
• Dual webservers with load balancing / failover
• Ideally offsite mirrored servers for fail over in the event of something catastrophic at your primary site
• A stock of common spare parts for you system

You've got to think about practical things like what happens when you need to patch your server and reboot - it will go offline? Or hardware failure such as hard disk / power supply taking days to receive replacement? What happens when a circuit breaker trips because of a dodgy tumble drier and you are not at home? What happens in an extended power outage? What happens when you inadvertently crash the website/server during an update and it takes hours to investigate? What happens if you move house? What happens if you have electrical maintenance / renovation work that requires the power to be off? Where is the offsite data backup and how often is it mirrored?

Fortunately you can get all this in one package with hosted web sites and that is what I'd recommend otherwise you are taking on the burden of data centre manager as well as website host.

There is nothing wrong with running a webserver from home for hobby and non-critical purposes, but your specification of "close to 100% uptime" relies on much more than just the WAN connection.

moneysavinghero

Would probably be easier to setup a VM on Azure or AWS

eloy7

moneysavinghero said:

Would probably be easier to setup a VM on Azure or AWS

It would be too expensive for my requirement. It is not a regular website. It is a repository for files for a group of people (not quite public) with storage of over 100 TB.

Billy_B_North

eloy7 said:

moneysavinghero said:

Would probably be easier to setup a VM on Azure or AWS

It would be too expensive for my requirement. It is not a regular website. It is a repository for files for a group of people (not quite public) with storage of over 100 TB.

“Specialist” photographs?

If you want guaranteed access it’d be normal not to have them stored at your home, is there any reason you’re not looking at this solution?

For m’y home I have three independent providers, a 4G modem, ADSL, and Starlink, with a load-balancing router which switches between them automatically.

onomatopoeia99

eloy7 said:

moneysavinghero said:

Would probably be easier to setup a VM on Azure or AWS

It would be too expensive for my requirement. It is not a regular website. It is a repository for files for a group of people (not quite public) with storage of over 100 TB.

If you consider that the best upload you'll get on FTTC (the most common domestic and small business connection) is 20Mbps, It's going to take 4 million seconds to upload all of that 100TB to just one user.  That's not far short of 50 days running the theoretical maximum upload of the most common type of a domestic connection flat out.