If you read your service agreement with your Cable Broadband Access provider, you will notice that your Cable company prohibits you from running servers on thier residential broadband service. If you do want to run a web server over your cable modem, you need to upgrade to a Business or SOHO (Small Office Home Office) account. Until now, most SOHO packages had ridiculously low bandwidth limits on thier business accounts.
My cable service provider in Nanaimo is Shaw, recently announced an increase in their bandwidth limits. A SOHO account has gone from a 2GB limit to a 40GB limit – all for a cost of $99 per month. The service includes your cable modem access (you probably already pay $39 per month for this) and basic cable ($20 per month), so to upgrade to a SOHO account will cost you an additional $40 per month. Host a few sites for some clients and you should be able to pay for this additional cost.
The 40GB limit now means that you can do some serious web serving from your home and will give you the ability to host multiple sites without having to be concerned about going over your limit and paying a surcharge for your additional bandwidth.
The biggest concern with Cable Broadband Access is reliability and uptime. I am currently running some uptime tests with Alert Site to test the reliability of my service provider. I will post the results at the end of the month.
