Can one run a server & still maintain personal privacy?

9 points

13 years ago

It seems to me that whether one is talking about email, or chat, or files, the closest thing to true personal privacy is if you own the machine itself and you have personal possession of that machine (e.g. it is sitting in your private residence).

On the other hand, most residential ISPs explicitly ban the running of "servers" as a part of their contract:

"... you are prohibited from running servers for mail, http, ftp, irc, and dhcp, and multi-user interactive forums ..."

Sure there are hosted solutions like EC2 or Linode or Rackspace, and a gaggle of smaller players too ... but this is still hosting your stuff on someone else's metal, in someone else's house.

Let's say for example I want to run Debian Server on a machine that sits in my basement, and I want to run an email server, a web server, and sshd so that I can do my own file syncing. Technically this violates my contract with my ISP. (let's set aside for the moment the myriad issues with running one's own email server)

The other issue is that (at least with my ISP) upload speeds are capped at a v. slow speed compared to download speeds. It would be an issue if I was off-site (e.g. not at home) and I wanted to sync up or transfer large files FROM my home server elsewhere.

So ... what's a boy to do?

seriously what are my options? No google fiber here.

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