John,
I'd like to preface my reply by stating that there are no universal rules
governing what an ISP or CLEC, or an ILEC, for that matter, can do in the
way of making provisions for its subscribers. These are largely business
decisions that they must make, and not dictated by established norms. At
least not as much as they once were.
If a service provider wants to satisfy a given class of customers by offering
off-the-beat beat services, even, they will tweak whatever it is that needs
tweaking in order to make that service good. They will even create gateways
if they have to.... for a price.
------
Having stated that, I'm not certain that I understand the entire scope of
what you would like to do.
>>Does anyone have thoughts on the server side? Can a person host in
their own server, using a dsl line (probably partial or shared line) out to an
domain service provider? <<
Yes, but is that all you want? How about fire walling? Mail servers? The
DNS servers themselves? Upstream access to the Internet's core? You
would leave these all to the ISP or DNS provider to maintain?
>But is it technically reasonable/feasible? <
Yes, it's technically feasible, but I doubt that it would be economically
feasible if you run up against what you've predicted in the following, unless
you had sufficient symmetric bandwidth:
>>I've got half a dozen sites out on cheap hosting services. At $10 per
month it starts to add up. And one client is talking about an application that
will run into the hundreds of megabytes if it takes off. All these applications
have different domain names. The seven (about) domains I've got up are on
I think three different DNS servers.<<
At some point you cross over to where the line costs are equal to, and then
can become far higher than, the colocation costs, if you are highly
successful on the hit count and content provision side of the business.
A single DSL line wont cut it, in that case. And keep in mind that you must
make allowances for incoming and outgoing traffic flows, and that means
that a simple ADSL line (which is asymmetric) wont do. In other words,
your limited upstream capacity on an ADSL line must satisfy your
customer's insatiable downstream requirements, and vice versa.
You'll need a more expensive symmetric line, like an HDSL or HDSL2
running at ample speeds, or maybe a T1 at some point. These line
capacities would then need to be matched by the ISP on the core side of
their routers, anyway. And the ISP, of course, already has this kind of
capacity to begin with.
But as far as your window (router port capacity towards the core) to the
'net, you could be effectively wind up paying for the same capacity twice,
if you were to backhaul everything to 'your place.'
No, you're not out of your mind, incidentally. Unless the economics are
proved to be egregiously out of line in favor of the local provider (and the
ISP or DNS provider). The economics have to make sense.
>>It's easy enough to get a domain name. How do you get your DNS
address set with a dsl hookup? Can you do it with a static address, or a
proxy?<<
Let me suggest that you go to the Boardwatch site where you can obtain a
wealth of information concerning these issues, including a good history of
the then and now of the Internet's architecture and rules. This article won't
talk to the DSL issues, specifically (that I recall, at least), but you can gain
a sense of the parameters involved in setting up a site, regardless of what
medium you choose.
The title of the article and its url follows:
"The Internet - What is it?"
boardwatch.internet.com
It's a long, multi-part article in the "Internet Architect" section, written by
Jack Rickard.
Frank_C.
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