What's your home internet connection?

Speakeasy.net has some very nice 6MBit ADSL connections here in Salt Lake City they offer to residential. They are pricey as expected, but that's a pretty nice connection for residential users:

Running through the Slashdot discount, $99/month isn't too bad (well, I've never seen anyone else offer 6Mbit anyway though):
http://www.speakeasy.net/ostg/adsl_pack ... kg=fastest

I know Speakeasy serves more than Utah, you'd have to look it up though.

Wish I could afford it... well, I wish I could get DSL period... I have really bad luck when it comes to ANY broadband connection, and that includes all 3 places I've lived in the past 3 years. Right now I'm stuck leeching one of my neighbor's wireless connection (apparently hooked up to their Comcast cable modem).

I spend 1/2 my time in NYC and 1/2 in the SF Bay Area. On both ends I have a cable modem connection to the 'net, and both are very reliable and fast enough for everything I want to do.

I like the fact that my Linode is in Texas and roughly equidistant between the two places that I access it from. Very convenient.

The real question is what hops are between both connections?

Hm, well it looks like it's somewhat closer, at least in terms of hops, to NYC than CA. However, the latency looks to be ever so slightly higher from NYC.

Traceroute from CA (hops 1 and 2 are internal to my company):

traceroute to ischo.com (67.18.176.43), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 10.100.40.2 2.406 ms 0.279 ms 0.219 ms
2 10.100.1.18 2.747 ms 2.708 ms 2.715 ms
3 192.168.243.251 3.002 ms 2.967 ms 2.972 ms
4 204.176.49.113 3.850 ms 3.591 ms 3.580 ms
5 206.112.96.142 4.255 ms 4.063 ms 4.633 ms
6 63.66.208.213 4.225 ms 3.968 ms 63.66.208.217 4.224 ms
7 63.66.208.2 4.471 ms 4.067 ms 4.218 ms
8 152.63.54.173 4.599 ms 4.718 ms 4.348 ms
9 152.63.48.114 4.590 ms 4.713 ms 4.472 ms
10 152.63.55.114 4.731 ms 5.078 ms 4.976 ms
11 152.63.53.250 7.978 ms 8.200 ms 8.092 ms
12 152.63.9.229 49.303 ms 49.302 ms 49.204 ms
13 152.63.103.218 51.430 ms 50.690 ms 50.813 ms
14 152.63.103.85 51.052 ms 51.074 ms 50.668 ms
15 157.130.143.226 51.073 ms 50.688 ms 50.556 ms
16 12.96.160.11 51.429 ms 51.451 ms 51.434 ms
17 67.18.176.43 52.132 ms 51.850 ms 51.825 ms

From NYC:

traceroute to www.ischo.com (67.18.176.43), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 10.32.64.1 8.787 ms 9.757 ms 9.945 ms
2 24.29.97.141 9.960 ms 7.944 ms 8.969 ms
3 63.208.104.41 9.970 ms 9.948 ms 11.967 ms
4 209.247.8.81 9.971 ms 11.918 ms 9.966 ms
5 64.159.1.109 47.952 ms 47.921 ms 47.955 ms
6 209.244.15.162 47.938 ms 47.926 ms 48.961 ms
7 63.209.48.110 58.940 ms 53.920 ms 53.944 ms
8 12.96.160.12 53.950 ms 53.923 ms 53.968 ms
9 67.18.176.43 54.914 ms 57.912 ms 52.945 ms

And just for fun, a traceroute from NYC to CA:

traceroute to tivo-gw.customer.alter.net (157.130.198.222), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 10.32.64.1 9.584 ms 9.687 ms 8.861 ms
2 24.29.97.141 7.793 ms 8.862 ms 8.885 ms
3 63.208.104.41 13.813 ms 9.887 ms 16.782 ms
4 64.159.3.221 14.735 ms 9.834 ms 8.881 ms
5 64.159.1.65 9.812 ms 11.863 ms 9.872 ms
6 64.159.4.146 10.810 ms 15.804 ms 12.837 ms
7 209.244.160.182 13.750 ms 9.845 ms 9.900 ms
8 152.63.21.78 12.838 ms 8.895 ms 10.843 ms
9 152.63.0.137 13.750 ms 13.802 ms 13.841 ms
10 152.63.1.33 85.745 ms 85.703 ms 85.793 ms
11 152.63.56.149 85.739 ms 91.685 ms 85.789 ms
12 152.63.55.82 89.694 ms 85.769 ms 85.769 ms
13 152.63.52.149 86.715 ms 83.757 ms 91.810 ms
14 157.130.198.222 96.668 ms !X * *
15 157.130.198.222 84.644 ms !X * 85.743 ms !X

Heh, that shows you are pretty close to the same "digital" distance from CA to Linode as you are NYC to Linode. Almost twice as many hops, but it looks like it's just bouncing around routers at whatever ISP you have in CA, but takes the same amount of time. That's pretty interesting.

What's your home internet connection?

Have laptop will travel.

I wouldn't need a linode if I had a computer with an always on internet connection. My internet access is by public wireless or internet cafes.

Yes you would, unless your "always on internet connection" provider also gave you a static IP. Which most don't. I use dynamic DNS for my always-on cable connection in NYC, but I wouldn't put any servers meant to be used by the public at large on it.

Also, it's a little slow in the upstream direction ... making Linode 100% worth it, even for those of us with always-on (and surprisingly reliable and robust) internet connections.

Bryan

I have a friend that uses old parts from his gaming desktop to use in a separate server box that currently hosts somewhere around 10 domains plus a number of sub-domains. I think he uploads about 10GB/month total. He simply splits the cost of the higher speed line (Last I knew, it was costing him around $90/month for his internet connection) with a few different people offering to pay to host a domain or two. All in all, he pays about as much as he would just for an internet connection, except now he can handle bigger personal downloads much faster without paying for the speed. His ISP was more than happy to work out RDNS for him. So he has pretty much an unlimited about of space to host on, and specs on the machine to allow for a very flexible setup of services.

The only drawback like you said though is that the internet connection isn't nearly as reliable, and upload speed still isn't great. He's still happy with it though, and it works for what he uses it for. Actually, I even have an account on the machine and host a couple sites from it. I've told him about Linode, and he thinks it's pretty cool, but if he was to take a step like Linode, he'd get a hold of a rackmount case, and do the colo option at this point.

I use Cable by Adelphia. I really like the 3Mb down. I love it even. Though the 256 up isn't so great - and the service is so horrible, unreliable and the customer service agents are just plain worthless jerks... Which is reason enough for me to be planning on switching to speakeasy when I can. But for $50/month, I won't be getting 3Mb down.

The service went down last night as I preped to pay some bills. The girl called them and asked what was up. The service agent says "We go down at this time of the night for an hour or so every night" Girlfriend says "We're always using it this time of the night and have not had any problems." so the agent says "Well I don't know what you want me to do about it!"

ahha. Is that classic? The TV was back on this morning... But the cable is still down. First call to them they suggested resetting the modem because there's no problem on their end. (already did that)

Second call later on they said there was a problem in our area and they're working on it. Here we are on the second night - still no cable modem.

What's a guy to do? (yah yah, switch to DSL when I have $200 to blow on the modem that I won't need for a few weeks while I wait for the rebate check)

{sigh}

Comcast I guess is the Adelphia equivalent here. It's exactly the same as you describe Adelphia. Good for the 3Mbit, but forget about it for anything else. That's what I'm currently stuck with right now since I've been rejected by both Speakeasy and Qwest/MSN with this old apartment.

There used to be no way to get around equipement costs and rebates with DSL before, but I haven't seen many services lately that bear that burden first signing on... at least not with cheaper services like MSN, who you can not only get the equipement free last I knew, but also have the option of renting a Actiontec modem for $3/month or something really small from the common CO (being Qwest here).

Interesting story, but I wonder if your friend knows what he's gotten himself into. Do the people who pay him for accounts on his server not mind an unreliable internet connection with mediocre upload speeds? Will they mind if his server crashes and they lose all of their data? What if he doesn't keep his system up-to-date with security patches and accounts on his server are hijacked/defaced? Is he prepared to handle all of the grief that his users will generate if something happens to his server?

I'm really glad for your friend if this works out for him but, sometimes the drawbacks aren't apparent until something goes wrong.

I used to have my server "colocated" at my friend's apartment. He had a "business class" DSL line which was only 384 symmetric. It still went down three or four times a year, and what was worse, his power went out probably once every other month. This problem was further exacerbated by the fact that he had built his own Linux firewall and it was unreliable - first he had all kinds of hardware problems and the firewall would lock up every couple of weeks, and only be rebooted when he got around to it. Then he replaced the hardware but bought a motherboard which had no "power on after power failure" option so when the power went out, it would not come back up until he was physically present to press the power button. Once over Xmas holidays I was out of town and so was he, and he had a power outage, and I had to call my father-in-law to drive out to my friend's apartment, use the security code to get into his garage, and reset the power on the firewall box. Needless to say, although the service I was getting was "free", it did not have satisfactory reliability, and what's worse was that I couldn't really complain because I wasn't paying anything for it. He was doing me a favor, even if it was a favor that was making me pull my hair out.

That's why I switched to Linode. Now someone *else* worries about keeping the hosts and network connection up 24/7, and my server reliability has improved *dramatically*. Also I get much better bandwidth. The only downsides are a much reduced disk space (hasn't been a big problem yet), and somewhat erratic performance on the host. Even with these problems it's 1000x better than what I had.

Anyway, despite your friend's apparent success, I would still recommend that people use a real hosted site for their servers (and I'm not all that keen on colo either because of the expense, and the only way to offset that is to put yourself back into the same position that your friend is in, being in the hot seat for problems of the subdomains that you host to help pay the colo bills), and Linode really is the best choice I have found by far for personal sites.

"DSL greater than 128K" ? Heh!

Verizon currently do 3.0Mb/s down, 768Kb/s up for $45/month or 1.5/384 for $35/month.

_________________
Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)

That include the line provider?
/me goes to check out Verizon

ADSL connection with
6500kb/s down
800kb/s up