Setting up a Webserver at home, need advice.

[FunkyCowie]

Currently I am paying £180 per year for webhosting, unlimited sites, 500GB bandwidth, 20GB webspace. My hosting runs out in may/june time and I am seriously considering saving my money for computer parts and installing linux on my dual xeon computer, setting it up as a webserver. Thing is even though I have read quite abit about it I`m still some what clueless. I have dabled with Linux a little before but mainly using it as a substitute OS rather than anything specific. So here come the questions...

1. Is it worth it? Would I save money?

2. My internet connection is 2.5Mbit down and 56Kbit up on average and supplied by BT. Its connected through a Router (Dlink DSL-504T Wired) which after about 70 hours of uptime has a tendancy to drop connection. Which is a big issue, any way around the dropping connection issue?

3. I'm used to cpanel are there any free cpanel type interfaces out there?

4. What is a good company to go through for dynamic DNS changing and what tracking software is best to use?

5. Is it worth it? (yeah I know I have asked twice )

Thanks in advance

 

[FunkyCowie]

yeah typo... was supposed to be 560Kbit up... hrmmm... food for thought I think I'll try and calculate how much power my dual xeon will consume in a year being on 24/7 and then see if its worth it. The only other thing is I`m addicted to Anime so I download a lot which of course would effect my upload...

 

[FunkyCowie]

I use aventurehosting and for me they are 100% reliable... I have had zero downtime and they don`t overload their servers... to be honest if you went for some where like dreamhost sure you could have 2TB of bandwidth but would you use it? would they really allow you to use it? I mean you could host linux distros and you might get 100 people download it at once and dream host would throttle the bandwidth because its too much... these 'cheap' companies do those kind of things. I have 4 websites right now and they really aren`t doing too much business so I could easily host them... the only thing is I think if they started doing well I`d have to go back to payed hosting from what I`m gathering from peoples replies.

Thanks guys I think I`ll stick with payed and put up with the wife complaining

EDIT: Media Temple do look very enticing... maybe I`ll swap over to them