Living with 1Gbps symmetrical at home versus dedicated

After three years with a 1U colocated server at OVHcloud, we migrated our lab workload to a residential 1Gbps symmetrical fiber plan. The financial savings are substantial, but the operational differences merit documentation.

• Latency: Colo averaged 0.8ms to regional IX. Residential fiber sits at 2.1ms with occasional 15ms spikes during peak hours.
• Routing: OVHcloud offered four upstreams with automatic failover. Residential presents a single AS path with no redundancy.
• BGP: No residential ISP permits announcement. We now tunnel through Vultr for anycast needs.
• Power: Colo included redundant feeds. Home requires UPS investment and single-point-of-failure utility service.
• Cost: $89/month versus $340/month colo.

  The primary surprise is upstream congestion mapping. Our ISP (Contabo) exhibits reproducible degradation:

  • 21:00-23:30 local: 15-25% packet loss to West Coast
  • 08:00-09:00 local: Bufferbloat to 80ms on upload
  • Weekend afternoons: Consistent 10% throughput reduction

We are documenting these patterns for a future post on residential suitability for production-adjacent workloads.

I used to work support at a hosting company, nothing this fancy. https://www.vultr.com