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

 

[Una]

1. Is it worth it? Would I save money?
No, obviously you would save money because you would not be paying your hosting fees, but your upstream b/w is not really enough especially if you plan serving files.

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?

Not really, depends why it is dropping the connection.

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

Yes there are a few.

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

No, It could also be against your ISP's terms and conditions.

 

[toy_soldier]

2. My internet connection is 2.5Mbit down and 56Kbit up on average and supplied by BT.

If that isnt a typo and your upload is actually 56kbit then it would serve pages very very slow. Even with a normal ADSL upload of say 256kbit it wouldnt be much use unless it was just serving 1 or 2 people.

 

[afraser2k]

1) It won't save you much money as you'll need to buy the hardware for the server, pay for 24/7 electricity costs and time for learning about server tools for whatever operating system you're using.

2) Your connection would only be suitable for a very small web site with a handful of users.

3) I know nothing about CPanel.

4) I use http://www.dyndns.org for my dynamic DNS, seems to work well with my home server and my .com domain name.

5) It would only be worth it for knowledge rather than saving money. I've certainly learned a lot about Linux since I setup a home server running Debian. It currently runs Samba for file server, Bind9 for DNS, Apache/MySQL/PHP for the web server.

 

[Mr. Brightside]

1) Depends if you already have the hardware and if you pay for your ADSL and electricity.

2) I'm assuming you mean 256kbit up. Even so, it's true that you can't expect to serve much other than pages.

I used to have a Linksys WRT54G that would crash every so often. Since it was so good aside from that issue, I bought another, which unfortunately didn't fix it. Then I bought a ZyXEL 652H router (ZyXEL were highly recommended to me in the networking forum). This cured the crashes for a while - until I upgraded to multiple WAN IP addresses which meant I needed to enable its firewall, which caused it to crash daily. I was so annoyed with consumer routers that I gave up on them and decided to build my own, with an old PIII box and m0n0wall. (http://m0n0.ch/wall). It really is an amazing piece of software and I've yet to have a single crash or other problem with it - might be worth considering it yourself.

All that depends on what your 'connection dropping' problem is - if it's loss of sync it could be a dodgy line or modom. If it's not that it's router instability of some sort and so the above is still relevent.

3) Depends what your requirements are. If you will be only using it for yourself I personally wouldn't bother with any sort of control panel - I just edit the config files by hand. Otherwise, ISP Config is supposed to be very good (not used it myself): http://www.ispconfig.org/

4) I used to use dyndns free services when I hosted on an ISDN connection (!!!) - which had a dynamic IP. A soon as my exchange had broadband enabled we got ADSL with a static IP (and since changed package to Zen ADSL Home 2mbit with five static IPs). Dyndns was great back then and is very compatible with all sorts of software - DD-WRT for one, aswell as m0n0wall.

5) Depends on how much it would cost you, and whether you are prepared to put quite a bit of time in initially configuring things. Other very important thing is to have patience and lots of it. When I first starting hosting, on ISDN, I was using an old rig of mine running Windows XP Pro, Apache 2, MySQL, PHP 4, Filezilla FTP server and miscelaneous performance, monitoring and maintenence tools. I did so for a few years, until earlier this year when I decided it was time to give Linux a proper attempt. I haven't looked back.

My server runs Debian with Apache, PHP, MySQL, apcupsd (for my APC UPS - I've also got it wired to a generator), Exim 4, Courier IMAP, Spamassassin and ClamAV for mail. And of course miscelaneous monitoring and maintenence tools.

The really big question really, is do you think you would enjoy it? It's a bit of a hobby in itself, so if you wouldn't enjoy it you may as well carry on with paid hosting. If you think you would enjoy it (of course there are times I wish I didn't bother - my server's on its third hard disk after two fatal disk failures and several other minor disk failures that caused OS errors and requiring reboots). I'd be delighted to try and help with any questions you have if you do decide to go ahead with it.

Other thing is, as Una pointed out, some/a lot of ISPs don't actually allow you to run your own servers. I specifically chose an ISP that does - you might have to change if BT don't like it.

Hope this helps, null

 

[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...

 

[GarethDW]

You pay a helluva lot for your hosting - I'm assuming you've got a dedicated box for that amount of money, which is massive overkill from the sound of things (if you're honestly considering hosting a site on your residential service - notwithstanding your ISP's ToS - then you can get by with shared webshosting, imo)

Why not have a look at cheaper alternatives. I use dreamhost - it's very cheap and meets my requirements, but if you're looking for 99.999% reliability from a UK-based company, then they might not suit you.

Anyway, here's what I get with my Crazy Domain Insane Level 1 package...

Disk Storage at signup: 200 GB
Automatically Increases Weekly By: 1 GB
Monthly Bandwidth at signup: 2 TB
Automatically Increases Weekly By: 16 GB

Plus it comes with all the usual goodies, such as unlimited mysql databases, unlimited email addresses, shell/ftp user access, even a free domain name registered.

The standard pricing is $120 (approx £60ish) for a year, but there are always dreamhost discount codes floating around t'internet that will get you a $97 discount off that price.

I'd give them a go, if I was you

More info: http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting.html

 

[toosepin]

DreamHost are great for simple packages, but it gets to the point when you do get fed up with DH overloading their boxes. Also it seems (form DHStatus) that something is failing everyday which to me doesn't seem right.

I'm with Media Temple now - professional, reliable servers with innovative ideas.

 

[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