SSH-accessible public ADOM server online (experimental)

[Alucard]

Yeah, if you go with a VPS, you let someone else worry about power, cooling, redundancy, reliability, failsafe methods, recovery, IPs, routing, etc.

For a home server, at the minimum you'd want a UPS (connected to the server and the server configured to shut down cleanly when the UPS tells it it's low), a static IP from your ISP, a decent upload speed (ie: nothing but fibre in the US), decent latency, a router with port forwarding that's not going to die when the 20th user connects (I've seen routers keel over when too many connections are open), and an ISP that won't care about all the incoming connections and the constant (low) traffic and the monthly upload total. Anything less and users will complain about unreliability, slowness, etc, and go somewhere else.

CPU usage is very low (unless you're on Amazon's lowest tier). It's more RAM intensive as users increase; I'm a bit worried about the 256MB Ancardia has, but it's been fine so far. Disk usage is low until someone leaves ttyrecs on for hours of botting. Network transfer is pretty low, only up to ~30kB/s; but over a month it can get above 15GB uploaded.

Gander at the Ancardia resource stats:
http://ancardia.us.to/vnstat/
http://ancardia.us.to/munin/us.to/an....to/index.html

Well I ain't paying $600 over 5 years for a server :P

$10/mo is too much ??

I'm a sysadmin during the day; I don't want to have to worry about all the above points all the time for my fun projects, which is why I pay the ~$15/mo (it's not static with Rackspace; I pay for network upload) for someone else to worry about it. And Rackspace (and Linode) are probably the top VPS providers and have been doing it for a longtime.