[olug] Cox Business Pricing

[nate]

> After 3 months, I decided the VPS was "good enough", and formalized my
> transition plans.  A short time later, I switched my home cable modem
> to the non-business account.  That was well over six months ago now,
> and I definitely have no intention of changing back.

This is certainly very nice way to go. I, too, use a VPS and it's
superior to running a server out of your basement for a few reasons.

First off.. you don't have to deal with the hardware. 

Secondly.. Email filter lists tend to frown on emails originating from
servers on residential network blocks. This is a black mark against
your email server. It increases the chances of getting caught in spam
filters. I don't know how big of a deal this is for 'business lines'...

If you get a Xen or KVM-based VPS then that means you have full-fledged
server as far as software is concerned. With container-style VPSes like
OpenVZ or Vserver you still have a few niggling problems. I ran into
them while trying to setup BIND and then later on when trying to
setup a VPN tunnel. Nothing huge, but irritating. But those types of
container VMs tend to be cheaper.

However.... The biggest problem your going to run into is that with only
one server for your email if/when your VPS goes down then people are not
going to be able to reach your server. If your going to be running
services like SMTP or DNS you really need to have 2 servers setup on
different netblocks. Having one server is fine, of course, if your just
doing it as a hobby, but if you are trying to depend on your email for
important stuff then this can be a problem. 

DNS is easy to deal with because you can get DNS mirroring services for
your domain very cheaply. SMTP I am not sure about.

Also if your doing heavy spam filtering or you want to do heavy website
scripting then the cost of renting enough resources on a VPS can get
quite expensive. This adds up over the course of the year.


Soo.... I say: Do both! 

:)