As an Independent Developer should I host my own official game servers

Question

My small team is approaching initial closed alpha for testing, however that has brought up the question of whether it is a good idea to host our official game instances from my home office or not. I've run a few dedicated servers before on my home PC (have 3 active as a service at the moment actually) so I'm not unfamiliar with the process. However I'm looking into building a server PC specifically to fulfill that singular purpose. I have google fiber 1000mbps so I don't think I'll have bandwidth issues. But I wonder if any of you have advice and insight into what I should expect, dangers to avoid, etc.

Here's what I anticipate, am I missing anything?:

1. Masking home IP via dynamic DNS service - (pointing to a website to login rather than an IP)
2. Running multiple VMs on a single server to easily manage server resources
3. Initially testing with a few selected users
4. Eventually open up to more users once proven stable

Answer 1

I once calculated the cost of buying a server and hosting it at home vs. renting an equivalent one from a cloud hoster for a couple years. I came to the conclusion that the hoster was in fact cheaper. Some things you might forget to account for:

• The hoster pays the electricity bill, which is not negligible for a server which runs 24/7.
• When any parts of the server break, the hoster has to replace them for free
• Your personal time for installing and setting up the server

There are also a few things you get by renting a server from a professional hoster which are hard to express in money:

• Better physical security. Ever heard of a game going offline because a burglar broke into a datacenter?
• Better availability (power outages, internet outages, etc.). Do you have an UPS and standby generator at home?
• Better protection from denial-of-service attacks. Yes, some people do get that angry when you ban them from your game. I've seen that more than once.
• It is very easy to upgrade and downgrade your hardware as needed (often with just a few clicks). This is especially useful when you can't yet estimate how much server capacity you will actually need.
• You can pick the geographic location (to a certain degree) to place the server closest to where your main player base is located.