home server vs webspace

[AHarvey]

Hi all,

I've had some webspace with Vidahost that I purchased about 6 years ago. Special offer for the first year but now its sitting at £70 for 2 years, not a lot I know but it is money I could do without spending.

Now, it was bought for building 2 photography sites on and me 2 domains point there but in all that time it is just something I never got around to and the majority of the business comes from Facebook.

Now, how easy would it be to use one of my i5 desktops to create my own webserver and host the sites myself? No fee's, unlimited storage and i'll also consider it a learning experience as well so the benefits are threefold. I will be losing expert help though which is the main issue. However the coming year it is all about making money and saving money so i am leaning towards making it.

Is it a daft thing to consider? I am sure some of you here have done similar.

Any help? More than willing to jump into Linux if needed too.

 

[edscdk]

Unless you are getting free electric it will cost more in power than your current hosting costs

 

[asim18]

I run LAMP on an Intel Atom based netbook. It's very low power and surprisingly reliable. I use it for hosting an intranet, random crap, testing etc, so local access only.

What sort of internet do you have, especially your upload speed?
Does your ISP have fair usage policies for too much uploading?
Is your internet responsive enough, what's your ping like to different locations in the UK?

Might be a better option to just get some cheaper hosting. You can get packages for around £25/year, and it'll be a lot better than spending £25/year on electricity to run your own web server.

 

[Craig321]

Hi all,

I've had some webspace with Vidahost that I purchased about 6 years ago. Special offer for the first year but now its sitting at £70 for 2 years, not a lot I know but it is money I could do without spending.

Now, it was bought for building 2 photography sites on and me 2 domains point there but in all that time it is just something I never got around to and the majority of the business comes from Facebook.

Now, how easy would it be to use one of my i5 desktops to create my own webserver and host the sites myself? No fee's, unlimited storage and i'll also consider it a learning experience as well so the benefits are threefold. I will be losing expert help though which is the main issue. However the coming year it is all about making money and saving money so i am leaning towards making it.

Is it a daft thing to consider? I am sure some of you here have done similar.

Any help? More than willing to jump into Linux if needed too.

Have you considered a smaller, cheaper hosting package, then host your photos on something like Amazon? $12-ish will get you 100GB storage with 100GB bandwidth in and 100GB out.

It's actually the data transfer out that puts the cost up, so as an example the same amount of storage with 10GB in and 10GB out will be about $4 (per month).

 

[RoyMi6]

1) Most, if not all, consumer ISP's forbid running servers on your connection. Not that they can EASILY tell and not that you'll have a high risk of getting "caught" or face any real repercussions - but not something to completely dismiss if you're running a public facing business site from said home server.

2) As others have said it's your upload bandwidth that's really going to be put under strain. Write an interesting post that just so happens to get retweeted on twitter by a celebrity (like my friend recently did) and get hit with about 100 visits a minute for over an hour and not only will your own website fall over but likely you're family won't be able to use their internet either.

3) Costs of running are probably higher than you expect when you factor in maintenance and reliability of uptime. Hell, do you really want to leave the server running while you pop away on holiday? Can you really trust your partner not to turn it off when she decides she wants to save some money on bills? For small sites remember that a single hosting package can likely cope with many individual sites. Vidahost for example allows for 6 sites to be run on their starter (£29 per YEAR) package.

So yeah, even for small sites I'd get some cheap and reliable hosting - as I already do.

 

[jsmoke]

As said it's mainly about your upload speed which is a fraction of your download speed, your upload speed becomes a users(to you server) download speed.

I think you are meant to get a business ISP account to run a web server, also there are the security issues, sql injection, cross site scripting and a plethora of other exploits.

Your main pluses would be you can supply whatever storage you can.

 

[Deleted member 77746]

For the sake of what it costs (TSOHOST: £14.99 a year + domain name costs).. it's not worth hosting on a home connection. I tried it for years but ended up only using it to mess about with. (Learning how to host, LAMP, DNS) e.t.c.

 

[Ol!ver]

I ran oliverhaslam.com from a Unix VM on an old desktop few a good while, and it survived being linked to from a couple of high-profile techy-types just fine. This was using one of Sky's broadband packages, so 1.3MBps upload.

The important thing to remember here though is that oliverhaslam.com is a static Pelican install, not a media-heavy database-driven behemoth like I suspect yours will be. That makes a hell of a difference when it comes to running on a local machine and serving via home broadband.

So, I'd say do it if you're into that kind of thing and performance isn't an issue, but realistically if you're not prepared to fight to keep the thing working then it's better hosted elsewhere.

I eventually went with Webfaction because I got sick of Sky messing around with my connection and forcing a new IP on me every other day. You spend most of your life updating DNS records that way!

 

[Pvt_Ryan]

Linode.com

$10pm for a basic vpc... i run 2 front end and back end. Very good hosts and constantly upping the lower end stuff for free