More speed or seperate IP

[Noway2]

I am planning on upgrading my internet service to accomodate a small business website and I have a choice regarding the type of service. My choice is between to upgrade my existing residential cable modem to a business class that will get me a (potential) 40% download speed increase and a 300% upload speed increase due to better bandwidth limits and to get a DSL line that will be slower on the download, but equivalent to what I have now on the upload side. The advantage of the DSL is that it would be a seperate line with a seperate IP address. Unless I am willing to pay $20 more a month, both accounts would theoretically still have dynamic IP addresses.

I currently have two virtual hosts on my Apache server, one for personal stuff and one for the upstart business. I am curious, from a technical perspective, which option would be better: more speed or a seperate IP?

Also would there be any real advantage to springing for the static IP, such as making secure sites easier instead of relying on SNI? If I made the business site the default, I could accept having the wrong certificate warnings for my personal site as I know what to look for an use it to encrypt my own traffic.

Anybody have any thoughts or experience in this matter that could help me decide which approach is the better one?

 

[donb01]

IMHO I would switch to the cable internet with a static IP and ditch the DSL. I was gung ho on my DSL for years and anti-cable until I bought a house and confirmed before I bought it that AT&T could move my high speed connection to my new location. When I placed the order to move the line I was told "who told you that?". Thus began my relationship with Comcast for cable. In both situations I had business-class internet and a number of static IP addresses.

Now I have at least 4 - 5x the (published) download speed and 3x the upload speed for about the same cost as my DSL was. I do pay for additional static IP addresses because I have multiple computers and gizmos exposed to the internet, but you probably won't need more than one.

Unless you have some ungodly level of traffic to your website(s) running multiple websites on a single server with one IP should be just fine. I'm running 4 websites on mine right now, and used to have a 5th one that streamed some video as well - in total they averaged 7 - 8 Gb per month, and that was alongside all my regular internet usage, some bittorrent, downloading software, etc and I never had any capacity problems.

I don't regret being forced to switch to cable internet, and to my knowledge I have only been aware of one significant outage that was a month or so after I had it installed, and was not just limited to myself. Beyond that none of the outside tools I use to monitor my websites has reported any outages to me.... knock on wood )

 

[Noway2]

Thank you for providing input and your thoughts. After making the initial post I had been leaning towards upgrading the cable to business class. What I was deciding against was springing on the cost of a static IP. Based on your comments and realizing that IE does not seem to support SNI (which allows name based secure pages) I have decided that I will go with a static IP.

 

[Noway2]

Just to provide closure on this thread, I signed the papers to get business class cable modem service with a block of 5 static IP addresses. It was only slightly more to get a block of IP address than one once I went with static. Ultimately, I decided to get multiple IP addresses so that I can better support the dual ethernet cards on the server and that IE does not support SNI.