Well, I can tell you of MY experience: It started as a deal with my ISP (the owner was a friend) who'd let me put a server in his rack for the price of one dialup. Sometimes last year, the ISP was bought by a larger shark and my "contract" went down the drain: I had to pay the local equivalent of 300$ a month for 1 gig of trafic at T3 speed. While not a bad deal in itself (it's roughly in the norm), it is pretty expensive for me to maintain this.
sadly, this also means that I had to stop hosting high-visibility web sites because they would put me above the trafic limit.
The asd truth is: if you ain't rich enough to donate a couple of grands to the community (in addition to your own time), you're going to have to find some other way to finance a high-visibility server...
Well, I can tell you of MY experience: It started as a deal with my ISP (the owner was a friend) who'd let me put a server in his rack for the price of one dialup. Sometimes last year, the ISP was bought by a larger shark and my "contract" went down the drain: I had to pay the local equivalent of 300$ a month for 1 gig of trafic at T3 speed. While not a bad deal in itself (it's roughly in the norm), it is pretty expensive for me to maintain this.
sadly, this also means that I had to stop hosting high-visibility web sites because they would put me above the trafic limit.
The asd truth is: if you ain't rich enough to donate a couple of grands to the community (in addition to your own time), you're going to have to find some other way to finance a high-visibility server...
Good luck,
Fulgan