home server

AHarvey · 25 Mar 2013 at 23:54

Hey,

We use a free webserver at work and despite my many requests they won't move to a paying solution so reliability is poor. We've not had access to it all day.

I've a couple of old PC's at home I am considering turning in to a basic webserver. Password protected areas and accessible to people at work.

Linux knowledge is very limited, Windows is much better.

What do I need to do to set up a secure webserver? Any decent guides out there to follow?

Pho · 26 Mar 2013 at 00:28

What are you trying to achieve in the end - public facing or just internal to staff? What do you need to host, static HTML or PHP/dynamic content? IIS on Windows should be more than adequate for pretty much everything though.

Are you hosting your public sites on a free host? tsohost/vidahost are about £15/year, hardly breaking the bank for the sake of the companies on-line presence!

StartSSL offer free SSL certificates, or failing that CheapSSLs are very cheap (though I've not used them); just go for their cheapest cert.

cheechm · 26 Mar 2013 at 01:16

As Pho said, depends what you're going to be using this for. However Xampp on windows is great for easy to use hosting.

AHarvey · 26 Mar 2013 at 04:48

It's purely for staff on and off site, currently runs a forum, a couple of databases + web front ends (A wiki etc). Basics would be HTML5, PHP, SQL etc. maybe moving on to some python/ruby as things develop.

Believe it or not we're an online company, several brands, hundreds of thousands of members/customers and lots of cash involved. Most of our servers are in London or Gibraltar. But despite the old "you department is a key cog in the machine" we get nothing. Hence why I am considering setting it up from home instead of with 000webhost. I've asked for an internal webserver, and all they talk about is sharepoint which isn't what we need or they mention putting it on an internal server, but then I'd lose admin rights and wouldn't be able to run it properly.

Deleted member 77746 · 26 Mar 2013 at 08:30

For the price of external hosting now you would be bonkers not going with a professional host like TSOHOST or something a long them lines.

Pho · 26 Mar 2013 at 14:33

Sounds like a bit of a pain for you then :/.

Are your existing servers visualised (either at your office or your collocated ones) ? Could they set you up with a virtual server if so? That way you're sandboxed off from the main server and get to host your internal stuff with full admin rights.

It'd probably cost you more than £15 in electricity to run your own server so if your company really are too tight to give you £15 (and they get to write it off against tax!) then personally I'd just pay £15 for proper hosting and use it to host your own domains / personal email at the same time.

You're near stoke, you don't work for Amazon do you?

.

jamesfreddie · 26 Mar 2013 at 15:44

It would cost more like £40-50 to run a PC 24/7.