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Web Hosting - Roll Your Own vs Hosting Company?
Case42 asks: "My former webhost company was recently acquired by a larger company that I find myself increasingly dissatisfied with. This presents me with a dillema and a question for all you slashdotters. Do I find another webhost or bite the bullet and host the site myself? I have a decent DSL connection and my site is low traffic, so i'm not concerned about the bandwitdth too much. I'm a sysadmin by trade so i can handle the technical aspects of setting up and running the site without a problem. Despite the fact that it means yet another system to administer i'm leaning towards hosting the site myself, anyone have any horror stories trying to host their site from home, any excellent webhosts out there?" How much traffic could a typical, residential DSL connection take out there, anyways?
Haha! Someone who went and made his own hosting co. actualy sat and wrote a HOWTO on it!
www.flexserv.co.uk/~manuela/howto/HOWTOHOSTCO.htm
You asked if I know of any good web hosts and I host with http://www.ProHosting.com They're not too big and not too small. Excellent support and good pricing. I have not tried to host my site at home but that scares me with my Qwest DSL because... Hey it's Qwest! I guess it depends on the kind of reliability you want.
768 down, 300-something up. I think I'm only guaranteed 128k up. My site took an average of 460 unique requests over the past two days, minus the Code Red nonsense (which is about an equal volume, seriously). Looks like about 30 unique people per day.
/.'d. :-)
I rolled my own because I wanted the experience, and because my ISP wanted $80 extra, per month, for a static IP. There was no one in town that I trusted to co-locate with (one was being sued by a school district, and the other I used to have email with and came to despise). I also wanted to try several different mail servers, with different OS's, and rolling my own was the only way.
If you don't mind not having the Gold service contract and some sort of guarantee that your connection will be up 24x7, try it from home. Buy a nice, quiet PC that you don't mind having on all the time, and buy something low-powered since it's going to run constantly. Expect to add $10 to your monthly power bill, minimum.
It's not that bad. Friends and other people don't comment about the slowness of my connection, and I'm not a chronic/compulsive downloader, so the connection's relatively traffic free. About twice per month I'll download over 50MB at one sitting.
And finally, I'm posting anonymously so that I don't get
While we offer DSL (and allow running servers on DSL, with static IPs), many members choose to colocate 1U or 2U servers to run their own web site(s).
This approach eliminates the reliability, latency and bandwidth issues that come from locating the server in your home, at the tail end of a DSL circuit. You get the same high-availability power, cooling, and connectivity as the managed services customers in the next room, at a fraction of the cost.
The biggest difference is that unlike hosting at home via DSL, turning up the bandwidth from 384K to X megabits is simply a matter of a cutting a larger check to the association, and a simple configuration change at the gateway router.
Each member gets a subnet (usually a /29) on a VLAN dedicated to their machine(s), with hard and soft bandwidth limits courtesy of Cisco's Rate Limit IOS Commands. This ensures that no one user can eclipse another, nor steal/spoof their IP addresses.
There are two major drawbacks -- This approach isn't cheap, and hardware upgrades and related repairs take some coordination for physical access to the shared rack space.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
We used to host our own mail and several small sites. There isn't much to it. You'll just need to set up a system and make sure it's secured. I used an OpenBSD firewall, but even one of the small NAT/firewall boxes will work fine.
The only downside is that you won't get the uptime of a colo center. I used SpeakEasy SDSL and while reliable, they weren't 100%. You just have to ask how important this site is and whether you can be down a day every month or two. Also, do you want other poeple using YOUR bandwidth?
Get a quiet system to run this on, as the whirring of a server will get old.
mod_gzip: use it. It will speed things up a lot
mail: if you are prone to outages, reboots or loss of power, you probably don't want to send your mail to your local box. Get a cheap $5 account and send all mail there. My connection went down when I was away on vaca and I lost lots of mail.
quiet: I kept my PC in my bedroom. My PC was loud. At times it would keep me awake or I would sleep on the couch. Get a quiet PC if possible
backup: Don't forget to backup. shit happens.
I used to host at home over SDLS, than northpoint went out of business. That sucked.
My replacement was an ADSL connection with a slower uplink and the tendency to drop the connection every few days. The only way to get the connection back is a hard reset of the DSL gateway/router. Damn!
I have since switched back to a 3rd party host.