Why pay for hosting?

[AtW]

This reminds me that new rack for dedicated SKA servers should be ready in 2 days... paying to host my own sites since 1999 I think

[Durbs]

I did it for about 6 months. Wouldn't bother doing it again.

Reasons for that are numerous but the fact i decided to go from paying £0 a month for home hosting to £100 a month for a dedicated datacenter server will probably give you an indication of how great hosting at home was.

[Cliphead]

Been running various sites at home for years. Started with a couple of RAQ4's but use a spare PC now running CentOS 5. I use dnsmadeeasy.com for DNS and an app called DirectUpdate which takes care of the dynamic IP address.

I've also got a CD somewhere which turns PC into a RAQ4 which makes it easy to manage everything from a web interface especially multiple sites and MySQL databases.

Running a webserver from home is fine for low volume traffic and testing, when I'm happy with a site or scripts it goes up to the dedicated server I have at SoftLayer.

Just remember to setup port forwarding on your router and harden up security as much as you can.

[NickFitz]

It can be done - Dean's been running his site from his kitchen for years.

I don't know what connection he's got though. Ah, hang on, here it is: 2Mbit download, 256Kbit upload ADSL.

[Pondlife]

Cheers all,

It was more an exercise in technical winking than anything else.

[DimPrawn]

As others have said, main negative points of hosting websites on your home ADSL line are:

1. Upstream bandwidth is very low. This makes your sites very slow.
2. IP Address can change, although mine changes very rarely.
3. Some ISP's forbid it and can close down your site if they don't like it.


I host a few websites on Virgin cable. Mostly test websites. Works okay for very light traffic.

Anything more serious, I'd get a dedicated hosted server and put all you website there.

Eg.

http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/dedicated...s/ds300-linux/

No bandwidth charges! Very important!

[Not So Wise]

Do non-business ISPs limit access to 'personal' webservers or do dynamic IPs make it unfeasable?

Most isp's forbit it, but main barrier is upspeeds on residential connections for most still suck

Other reason is if your site is for much more than testing you cannot flood your connection doing massive downloads/torrents without slowing your site to a crawl

[chicane]

It's also worth bearing in mind that a specialist hosting company should be able to "lock down" their servers much better than the average guy on the street, in theory providing a much greater degree of security.

I run a static HTML hobby website from a home server to save on hosting costs, but certainly wouldn't want to run any kind of business in the same way.

[Moscow Mule]

If you want your own server it's going to cost more than a few years hosting.

BUT you can do it, I use open DNS and myco website is run from a server connected via residential BT broadband.

[HairyArsedBloke]

I'm doing it and I think it's a bad idea. It'll be OK if you don't expect more than a couple of hits a day, but up stream speeds are too slow for anything more than trivial cases.

Once I've sorted out a new project I'm working on, I'll be hosting with a proper supplier again.

[Pondlife]

Why do we (mostly) pay for hosting? How much of a PITA is it to do yourself?

Do non-business ISPs limit access to 'personal' webservers or do dynamic IPs make it unfeasable?

LAMP, Postfix, Bind DNS... What else would be needed?

Just curious really.