I'm a Comcast user, and while I know that I'm breaking the user agreement by hosting servers, I do it anyway and so far they haven't been bothered by it. My presumption is that clause is more of a CYA on their part that if you begin consuming terabytes of bandwidth hosting your own Youtube site or whatever, they don't need to invent much of a reason to turn you off. Frankly, I'm OK with ignoring it because it seems totally unreasonable in its current wording. What is a server? Sure, Apache is pretty cut and dry, but what about hosting a L4D2 game for three friends? What about that World of Warcraft patcher that acted as a Bittorrent client? How about those Javascript libraries that "crowd host" your website? As far as I'm concerned anything that sits on a port waiting for a connection is a "server" and its almost impossible to do much online these days without unknowingly running one.
If Verizon is more stringent on this, you do have a few options if you want to do it anyway. One of the easiest is by only running the server when you intend to use it. Set up a script that allows you to turn it on/off via email or tweet or something. Or setup a port knocker script that closes the port, only opening it for outside connections when you want to watch Archer or whatever. That will protect you from the usual port scans and such, and is likely all you need to evade Verizon's ire.
The increased bandwidth usage is a trickier problem that, depending on your location/ISP, paying for offiste hosting may be your only option if you intend to stream large amounts of media. This is likely only going to get worse as infrastructure continues to degrade and ISPs continue to sit on it, so I envision we'll all be looking for options here in the future.
Fair points. Now that you mention it, the CYA rationale makes a bit more sense. And yup - it's like you said, it's almost impossible to not be contributing to other Internet users in some regard most of the time, with peering really being the LCD of those situations. Hell, being the host in a Halo matchmaking game would be enough for them to nuke your service, by contract logic. Also, good idea on the tweet/etc - even a simpler option would be doing something like a text file on S3 that just flags it as on/off, and let the script poll that every so often. I think I'll do that.
Aside, but as an unreasonably paranoid person, I appreciate the candor WRT "screw it, I do it anyway" - this (personal media hosting/availability) specifically has been a pain point for a while, and with a decent pipe to the house and plenty of storage, it'd be a shame to let it all go to waste. ;)
As far as I'm concerned anything that sits on a port waiting for a connection is a "server" and its almost impossible to do much online these days without unknowingly running one.
Absolutely true. I'm on Comcast too, and technically both my Tivo and WiFi router are 'servers' because they accept incoming connections from the internet. I also run a regular server for a few things, and I've never had a problem, but it's all been for personal use and light-bandwidth. I think if I started streaming multimedia out of the house, I'd run the risk of setting off some bandwidth usage flags. But so long as your total in+out bandwidth is within their cap (250GB/month on my residential service) there's probably no problem.
If Verizon is more stringent on this, you do have a few options if you want to do it anyway. One of the easiest is by only running the server when you intend to use it. Set up a script that allows you to turn it on/off via email or tweet or something. Or setup a port knocker script that closes the port, only opening it for outside connections when you want to watch Archer or whatever. That will protect you from the usual port scans and such, and is likely all you need to evade Verizon's ire.
The increased bandwidth usage is a trickier problem that, depending on your location/ISP, paying for offiste hosting may be your only option if you intend to stream large amounts of media. This is likely only going to get worse as infrastructure continues to degrade and ISPs continue to sit on it, so I envision we'll all be looking for options here in the future.