and thats a personal item?????

 

Yes, that's at home. I run a datacenter at home, as well as build the manage them for work

 

lucky ***.

i got a linksys

 

Oh at work, that's not fair lol

 

No Deej, at home.

 

Dude I'm not as stupid as Jrock looks. So you're trying to tell us that you personally spent that much on a router? Or was it "surplus" from where you work?

 

I host web servers for a lot of people and mom&pop/small companies... everything I have in my datacenter at home is/was an investment and has already made the money back, or will in a max of 24 months. Been doing this for 4 years here in Chicagoland, and did it for 2 years near Indy before moving. Makes for a good side job and extra income. Requires a bit of coin up front, but it does pay off, even on a small scale.

 

So why isn't your post count higher?

 

lol


7.5K is a lil' coin upfront???

 

ok - when I started the gig, yes a lot of it was genuine university surplus from Michigan State and Indiana U, but as the client base increased, thankfully so did the funds, and most it went back into the business over the years. Customer needs were on the rise, plus my own areas of interest, so I needed the bandwidth. Actually - until just last week I had about 1/3rd that much upload speed. I managed to work out a deal with the carrier that gave me gobs more bandwidth for very little $.

At the end of each year I take a good piece of the extra money from this gig and buy one new or newish piece of gear that will benefit. This year was the big step up with the Cisco. I got it used - paid about half original price, and it will be able to keep up with the core networking and muxing needs I will have here for at least the next 5 years, and quite possibly 6 to 8. A good investment, if you ask me. It is one of only a handful of bigger budget items that I would like to get to help things here. A lot of my servers are 3 to 5 years old - sold off cheap by companies or universities upgrading... so I buy them up, max out the processors and ram, and throw some disk at them, and they are more than sufficient for my needs, and I won't have to think about changing anything on them for 2 to 4 more years.

I actually missed my opportunity to do this the right way a bunch of years ago with Sojourn Systems in Lansing, MI. It started as an old surplus computer in a janitors closet, and was selling shell accounts to students for $20 a month. Within a year he had expanded to a few machines strategically placed in the building. I had the chance ti invest , but was still a student at the time and had very limited funds. He pulled it together anyhow, and within 3 years it was the 2nd largest web, mail, and dial-up internet providor in central Michigan. In the early 2000's he was bought out by the 2nd largest ISP in the state - ACD.NET... for about 10 to 12 million.

So there it was - my chance - and I missed it. All I needed was 20k, and I could have walked away with nearly half. So... now I just do something similar, but for today's times, and on the side. It works, and gives me a little extra cash to play around with... and it also enabled me to buy my new house. Woo.