[bradleyland]

It's not so much the amount of bandwidth you need as it is the type of bandwidth and equipment required. You can get cable internet with a 2 mbps uplink speed, but the equipment won't handle the levels of concurrency that you need to serve pages with any reasonable degree of responsiveness. My developers are located in various places around the US, and at various times, we all run dev servers coupled with DynDNS so we can preview what's on someone's dev branch without a push and deploy. Even with fast connections (+2 mbps up) in metro areas (few hops), the serve stats are ridiculously slow. And what about an SLA? Your cable provider doesn't care that your sites are down when your lawn man cuts your cable with his edger. You need a T1 or better with a good router and switching equipment to do it properly.

Couple that with the fact that bandwidth is only part of the equation. How much downtime can you afford? Do you have redundant power? UPS? Generator? What about environment? Do you have sufficient HVAC?

To implement all the required facilities for a server or two is just ridiculously expensive, especially in light of all the quality VPS providers available.