I’m just a hobbyist, but I’ve considered hosting VMs for my family’s Accountancy firm for QuickBooks Desktop so they can share the same company files while out of the office etc, but the thought of my internet going down and them not being able to get work done is a big deterrent.
Realistically, I assume it would make more sense to set up a VM on a platform like Digital Ocean or something than my NAS, but I was just curious what the best practices for these sorts of things are.
Thanks
I agree that a remote server would probably be the right choice here.
But if you want to have a local solution it might get a little complicated.
If you have a business, the first thing I’d do, is to always get a symmetrical business internet subscription with your provider. Depending on the cause of the downtime, your internet might not be up and running again faster than with a normal subscription, but you’d get immediate support and information on when the problems will be resolved.
If, however, a trunk line is severed by a construction worker, as it happened to me once, the outage can last for a couple of hours, so you’ll need a fallback solution. Many properties have two or even three ways to connect to the internet: copper VDSL, cable, fibre. (And there’s also the possibility of cellular internet using 5G/4G.) So to ensure uptime, I’d probably want two means of internet access, your main one being a fast connection with a business subscription, the fallback one with a cheap & slower consumer connection.
But I wouldn’t know how to set it up technically. I assume that your router would need to be connected to both modems, with all of your local network traffic normally routed through the primary modem… so if one of the WAN uplinks goes down, you’d need to log in remotely via the secondary connection, and redirect all of your network traffic to the secondary modem.
But that would be kind of a hassle. So are there routers that can reroute automatically? Don’t know. Maybe there are combo routers, e.g. VDSL or fibre plus 5G, which might reroute traffic automatically, when one of the connections goes down.