How about redundant power?

I have a lab in my garage that consists of 19" racks my colo provider gave me as a gift, populated with a ton of Cisco routers and switches (including a Catalyst 6506), and several desktops and servers, including two Sun x4100s. For power, the lab has three 20 amp circuits.

Its only usable for testing, as I only have a minimal amount of bandwidth from Time Warner Cable, and the garage features no air conditioning. Thus, during the summer I have to shut it down on particularly hot days.

Also, the high speed fan assemblies on my x4100s have a nasty tendancy to eat bugs. The bugs will, for the most part, get caught on the grille, but while removing them, its easy to let slip a leg or a wing or other appendage.

Fortunately the fans are hot-swappable. Needless to say, however, this is *not* a production grade environment. :-P

My real stuff runs at a big datacenter in downtown LA.

Hot wings!! Sounds like a great lab.

a gift? You must be spending a lot per month with your provider lol

Your electric bill must be alot right?

I believe Jordan explained it the best on the first page. A datacenter really is far too delicate to run from your home. Datacenters in Europe for example have to live up to 10.000s of different standards.

I don't think any of your customers would be excited to learn that you're running the data center out of your basement. I mean, I would worry.

There are so many benefits to colocating equipment at a datacenter and the costs are really not that high anymore. If you're considering doing this in your home you should at least look into the costs of nearby datacenters and consider that option.

DC in Basement = Bad name in hosting business for all of us - PERIOD --

you can never run a large client base, or maintain and provide excellent service to a large client base in your basement and be cost effective. YOU CANT - please post if somebody is running out of their basement and is using more then 10 mbit/sec on multiple servers

then tell everyone your cost for bandwidth and your hydro bill every month ...

Like Sifork said for one to a few servers for testing for you own personal stuff - not a problem but for real customer data - go to a co-location center.

also what about firewall, security appliances etc?

Here is the big problem ... to many people try basement hosting, and screw it up and those customers clump all the small hosting companies in the same lot and go to yahoo, godaddy, etc from the brand name .

I hate when customers ask me Do you do hosting in your basement?? -- my answer of course is NO - and i hate the answer even more -- oh we were with abc co and our site went down for 3 days and we found out he was hosting in his basement so we signed up with godaddy -- HATE THAT ..

You have to admit in a weird sort of way that it is funny. I guess around here there is not a lot of people running DC's out of their basement. Hell I would go as far to say no one is. We live in a low technology area.

In an odd sort of way, it makes me laugh. There was an old Sprint faculty in an office building downtown that they were doing six months free and $10.00/sq. ft. per year. That included the HVAC I almost jumped on. I believe it is still available. While it would be a great location for about 20 racks the bandwidth would literally kill us.

There would be no form of power red. or backup generators. I knew it was a great deal because of the fact no one knew what the cost associate it was when they asked me what a data center was. lol Plus there was only 20 x 20 amp circuits so I could only fill them half up unless I was using ATOM's lol

I don't know about a DC in a basement but maybe a backup server if your colo DC has problems, you atleast have a back up.

The best option is I think a great company in your area for collocating your servers for start

I don't think customers will trust having their websites hosted in a basement, an unprofessional environment.

Doesn't sound too safe. You might be someone who is willing to burn down his house. You would need some serious power upgrades. At least a 3-phase panel.

This is definitely not recommended. Just rent a few servers in a proper DC.