[jhancock]

sysadmin duties is not always a full-time job. I have a single server in production (4 cores, 8GB, RAID-1). I own it and pay a reasonably-low monthly fee to run it at a good data center through a small provider that has solid skills to back me up if I run into something out of my league.

I spent some time installing and configuring it. I documented my install very well. I rarely touch it now. Backups are automated. It runs smooth. If I do have trouble, I have my docs to go back to. Most likely any trouble will be hardware failure. That's the biggest risk of running your own server and only having one. So far, its been 4 years in operation and has more than paid for itself. I have horsepower, memory, and disk space to spare.

At this point, if I had a hardware failure expensive enough that caused me to want to toss the server and start over, I could be back up on something new in a day thanks to my trusty docs. So far, 4 years, zero downtime!! The last year, I spend about 2 hours a month doing sysadmin stuff.