I'd like to hear other peoples experiences of self hosting their website at home. I have DSL 1mbit down and 512Kb up is this enough? also what spec machine would I need I have an old Pentium 3 lying about. It's a fairly small site with 3 MySQL databases. I would like Recomendations or advice if anybody has any, or is it more trouble than it's worth?

Thanks

Red

I would have to say it's more trouble than it's worth. First of all, most DSL/Cable providers discourage this and go as far as to not only block port 80 (http:// port) but may also cancel your account with them for bandwidth reasons.

Secondly, keeping a website up 24/7 requires a lot of effort on the part of a sysadmin to eliminate downtime and ensure peak performance.

Just to give you a general idea, a single server is used to host only these forums. It's a Pentium 4 2.4 ghz with 1 gig of RAM.

A much better solution is to invest in shared hosting with a reputable hosting company. You can get a great value to setup a website for as little as $10/month.

Thanks Dani, I was just toying with the idea I currently use shared hosting and I have no complaints about it apart from when I started hosting with them they were getting massive DDOS attacks but it seems to be ok now. I probably stick with what I have but I was interested to find out about the ins and outs of it.


Cheers

Red

One of the disadvantages of the ADSL platform is that because it's asymetrical, you're not going to be taking full advantage of the bandwidth available (since you'll be serving files through your upload capacity, which will slow things down considerably when the line gets busy with people requesting pages/files).

Another disadvantage - you don't (at least not here in the UK) have any SLA should the line go down. It'll get put right when the telecom provider feels like correcting it

SDSL and other technologies will hopefully change all of that, but until now it's still best to either get shared (or virtual private) hosting or a dedicated server.

Regards,

Martyn

Thanks Martyn, I take your points about ADSL upload speeds and you're right there is no SLA here in Ireland either unless you want to shell out for a leased line. My line has been fairly reliable since I got it installed exept when it was down for a week because some clown removed the jumpers from my line in the exchange all the telco kept telling me was my line conditions must have changed:rolleyes: but since I work for the telco I went up to the exchange and collared one of the engineers to fix it for me.

i do agree its more trouble than its worth, it takes alot of time and more money than just buying some hosting ive tried this already and its not worth it i think

I dont agree with you guys when you say its more trouble then what its worth :-| . About the alots of time and money..? It doesnt cost a penny to launch ur own server , and the time part it takes all of 3 mins to get ur server installed and launched.!

I have been running a website and a forum of my comp based server for like 3 or more month's now.! I am on Shaw cable (Roger's communication's) and they have not sent me any letter's telling me about my banwidth. My forum has like over 400 or more members , my forum is running off my 700 mhz computer. The only down time people suffer from is when my comp descides to shut down, or when im dloading sumthing.! Im on cable internet, and i have only 512 ram. So you dont need a fast system to run a server.! On average it takes all og 2 seconds to load my pages.

I host my personal website and mail server on cable (OptOnline) and the only investment of time I've spent on it is the initial configuration to the servers, which was about 3 hours total, once I got the DNS working.

The reason (I think) you need such a beefed up server for the forum is because of the database. I former collegue of mine ran a site on a 486 with 128 MB of RAM on FreeBSD and the server was serving an average of 40,000 hits per day. Of course, that was a few years ago, so I have no idea what the site's running on now (I don't even remember the URL to even check it.)

My point is, it all depends on what your site is going to be serving (content-wise.) If you plan on having a few .html pages, or even .php, you shouldn't need a high-end system. If you're going to be accessing databases, then that's where the performance issue comes into play, requiring a server-class system.

If you enjoy tinkering with webservers and the like, you probably won't even mind the time you spend working on it.

...just my 2 cents...

Doesn't OptOnline block ports 80 and 8080? I have OOL as well and that's what they do here in NY.

Yes, they do block 80, which is why I have the firewall listening on another port. I had to create a firewall/nat rule that redirects the packets to the right IP:port on the internal net for web, but mail (25 and 110) works just fine.

Let me know if you want to see how I did it :)