Why aren't you using a real data center? Hosting it using a residential connection seems very weird and problematic.
A fair question, but we have good reasons for it.
A 'real' data center has tons of limitations, compared to only a few advantages.
We did shared hosting in a datacenter once for TPB, but this was really very slow. As in 20x slower than running a dedicated server.
Running a dedicated server in a datacenter is very very expensive. Colocation is also expensive, but not as expensive as dedicated hosting, but it has the problem that you need to drive all the way over there if something is wrong.
The problem in all cases is: You have a contract, and it's very clear that piracy is a no-go.
Even though we don't do piracy over here (content is hosted elsewhere), not everyone sees it that way, least of all the copyright owners. Most just like to scream and harass us, and if they don't get their way, they will turn on our hosting provider. It happened multiple times. If you have a 'real' hosting contract, well.. byebye, your server gets deleted. With internet service providers, it's a different game. Kwuk and I both had the experience that those providers are actually on our side. They've asked us what's going on, we explained, and now they're actually helping us.
That just speaks for them, and we're grateful for how they approach this. That's why we choose to deal with that this way.
We did have our server in a datacenter before, as a VPS, this was really really slow. Especially when loading starmember images, because those were generated on the fly.
When we moved from a VPS to a dedicated (bare metal) server, the loading times went from 2 seconds to 0.1 second. Therefore, a dedicated server always has our preference.
A datacenter has high uptimes, and even an emergency generator to keep everything running, which is good.
Downsides though:
- Very expensive, the server that we're running TPB on cost us €1000. If I have to hire a dedicated server of the same capacity, it costs us €200 per month, and we wouldn't even have raid 5 storage backup storage. After 5 months, it would be more expensive than the server itself.
- Alternatively, you could do co-located hosting: You'd place your own server in a data center, you'd just pay for power and network. Which would still cost us €100 per month, and if something is wrong, we'd need to request access and drive half the country before we can get to it.
- In both cases, you'd still pay extra per GB of traffic used, and per Watt of power used (at premium levels)
- Most importantly: If someone claims you engage in piracy activity, they will take down your server, no questions asked. This is part of the hosting contract. Which is ironic, because we do not engage in piracy. Content his hosted elsewhere, but that has not stopped many people for trying. You see, many people just explode when they see content they think they own on another platform, unaware of how hosting works, how copyright and/or public domain works. It doesn't matter to them when they post a picture on Instagram, that
Our ISP's really take our side on this matter, they've got our backs, and I don't get the impression that hosting companies rather hide behind contracts.
That's why we choose to do things differently: cost and legal reasons.