Thanks for the kudos... I will do my best to answer in a non-technical aspect.
There are several ways to do hosting....
- Shared hosting: This is normally for small static sites that need a presence or basic dynamic sites like forums hosting or Wordpress. All customers are shared on the same machine as well as resources. You don't typically get an administrative login to the machine (as its not yours to begin with) and you are trusting the server owner/administrator to manage the resources and various hosts as to not get too backed up or oversold/overcommitted. This is not a great fit for us as you can imagine with 18 years of searchable content, images, and attachments, the database size easily exceeds what the largest standard hosting plans allow.
- VPS or virtual private server: In this world, a high powered machine with lots of resources gets installed with a virtualization package such as Citrix Xen, KVM, HyperV, or VMware. You pay for how much of the total pie you want split into your realm. You do typically get the administrators login because you typically are leasing that slice of the pie, but not the entire machine. Again, the size of our 18 years of searchable data would put a larger slice of pie on the storage resources and would be affordable we it not for the database enority.
- Dedicated hosting: This is either an owned server or a leased one from the hosting data center that you pay to "house" in a facility that provides for the environmentals (redundant internet connectivity, redundant power, redundant cooling... from the redundancy department of redundancy
) and you pay based upon the consumables of space used, power used, and internet (cooling in calculated into power). Space is calculated based on the "u" size or unit size. In 19" telco/datacenter rack mount servers there is a "u" size. All servers are the same width to fit between the mounting racks. The variables is depth and height. The height is "u" size and 1U is 1 and 3/4 inch tall. So a 3U server is 5 and 1/4 inch tall. (reference - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rack_unit
- Collocation cabinet: These are basically lockers of a set size. Put in an much or as little as necessary, typically the limiting factor is the size chosen and the power provided. Full rack is typically 42U of space, half is 22-24U, one third is 10-12U with the variable being now much space is used for dividers between cabinets and other mounting infrastructure. In the Facebook video, the server area you see is typical 19 inch center posts racks and when you see me walk through the door you see full and half cabinets.
- Lastly is cage space: This is just like it sounds, a fenced or caged space on a data center floor for multiple racks of server and IT infrastructure. Here too, you pay for space, power, and internet and or cross connect circuits. This is for big business.
I dont have the cost right now as I am in negotiates for a "great" deal. Management of Fiberpipe knows the SVXWN does not operate on a profit model so I am likely to get a bit of a break and closer to "at cost" hosting fee. In reality, we are moving into a half cabinet (there are no 1/3 cabinets open at the moment) and retail would be $300-500 a month. For reference look here:
https://www.colocationamerica.com/co.../half-rack.htm
When I have the contract negotiated, I will post an update before I sign anything. I could put the gear in my house... I would increase my power bill... residential power is way more expensive vs industrial in cost per kwh. But the bigger issue would be uptime reliability and quality or lack thereof for internet connectivity at the residential service agreement. I get brief outages all the time here and that would mean service downtime for the network every time.
I hope this brings more understanding to those whom are interested. I will post updates here and photos if people want.