New To Web Development Forum

What you now need to do is think security. If you are using a mainstream distribution then you will be able to check for updates to your operating system online. For example Suse has "Suse you" and Redhat had "online update" both of these systems are designed to keep your operating system and related software up to date. This is very important from a security point of view because the updates will contain security patches and bug fixes. Ensure you keep your system as up to date as possible. No system will ever be 100% secure but you need to be prepared to keep on top of updates and security fixes.

I also find it is very useful to follow news groups and forums very carefully. Very often that can be great for giving you a "heads up" on potential threats.

You need to also pay very close attention to your router. The router also has software that is usually updated periodically. From a security and reliability point of view it is important to ensure you use an up to date version of their firmware. The router is the first point of contact between your network and the internet. You need this part of the system very up to date. when you are sure your server and your router are up to date you can now begin the process of opening up your server to the internet.

At this stage I recommend you pause and have a proper read through your router handbook. I cant offer any advice relating to any specific router. All I can do is explain the procedure and you will need to work this out based on your own equipment.

The first think you need to do is locate a feature called "port forwarding" (or something similar) What you then need to do is set up a port forwarding rule to ensure that all port 80 traffic is forwarded to the ip address of your server. There is no easy way to explain how to do this because every router admin interface will be slightly different. Some routers also have pre-set rules that you can apply to a given ip address. For example Dlink routers have a preset rule for a "web server" All you need to do in this case is to specify a LAN ip address where you want web traffic to be forwarded. At this point is is very very important to make sure that ports that you do not need are closed.

Currently all we need is port 80. You can close other ports. If you have a domain that is registered with a domain registration company or a web host you will need to make changed to the DNS in order for the domain to point to you. What you need to do is use what is called an A entry to point the domain (www.example.com) to your external IP address. The external ip address is the IP that can be used to reach your network from the web. This is sometimes referred to as a Wan address.

Usually this can be set from within your host or domain registration companies control panel. If your host makes the changes take effect right away then you should be able to then go to www.example.com and see your website.

This is the part that is difficult to explain.

Of you are on your network you will not usual be able to see your website without setting an entry in your pc's host file. The router is designed to handle requests from the outside. So even if you type in www.example.com the chances are it will display your routers admin area as opposed to your website. For this reason I suggest you try viewing your web pages from outside of your network to ensure it is functioning correctly.

An alternative is to connect through a proxy server to try and view your pages that way. The problem with using a proxy server is they can be very slow and as a result it will not give you a fair indication f the speed of your pages. The best thing is either do use a second home internet connection (if available) or use a friend or family's internet to make checks.

Basically you now have a working web server hosting your content from your own location but you are lacking in a lot of functionality such as statistics, logging, cgi-scripts etc.

What we will now do is add a few features to enable you to get a bit more from your server.

We are going to set up your server so that it will store log files in a file called "access.log" What I tend to do is store my log files in a folder called /logs just above the users home directory. So in the case of Joe his logs will be located at /home/Joe/logs

The first thing you will want to do is create a directory for storing the logs and make it writeable. log in to your server with shell and do the following...

I would strongly recommend anyone considering self-hosting to familiarize themselves with running a server by building a test setup first, where connections and downtime are not an issue. I prefer Linux hosting too, and it is best to pick a Linux distribution and stick to it: whether you choose Mandriva (formerly Mandrake), Fedora, Suse or Debian, or also one of the BSDs, they are all up to the task of web hosting. Get to know how your distribution works in detail, including managing services, adding components and updating routines.

I will however keep a server at home with the exact same set up as my remote boxes. That will make it nice and easy to test applications as well as testing updates before I put them on the live servers.

At the time, (around 1994-1995), a T1 cost me roughly $1500.00 month... as time went by, I realized I wasn't coming anywhere close to using the bandwidth I was paying for and cut back to a fractional T1, (roughly 384k). That cut the cost to about $700/mo.

While it was great having the servers sitting on a rack in my own office, what was lacking was redundancy... when the pipe went down EVERYTHING was down.... I was using @HOME Network, and they were building out their infrastructure --- it wasn't uncommon for an outage 5 states away to put everyone connected to my small ISP business offline for 1/2 a day... and it was me who had to answer the phone 7/24 to explain why dial-up constomers couldn't connect and why sites were down.

Luckily, I got a job offer from another local ISP who was building out a state of the art data center, and part of my deal was I could bring all my hardware into their facility and run on thier redundant systems.

I stopped offering dial-up when the cable companies began wiring my town for fibre-cable access... that killed 50% of the revenue that was offsetting the frac-T1 costs, (plus I saved on all the dial-pu incoming lines I was running --- BBSing was dying and dial-up along with it).

I have never regretted NOT having the servers in the house since, and every time I even think about putting up a box, I remember the nights, weekends and vacations spent troubleshooting hardware, answering customer phone calls and generally babysitting a pile of copper and silicone instead of having a life.

Nowdays I pay for top shelf hosting with dedicated 100Mb ports, 2/47 live support and don't regret it one bit.

Even if you spend $25/mo for good "basic hosting", you would need to host 10-20 sites on your own server(s) in house just to come close to the monthly cost.

Now the flip side: Yes, running a box a home gives you immediate access to hardware, server config, and is a developers dream --- I used to code on the server, save a file and see it immediately on a second machine the way the rest of the world sees it. There is a problem though.... You get used to that type of access, then when you really need to work remotely, you inadvertantly run into something that requires a hardware or low level system reboot --- and if you aren't home, you're stuck.

What I have played around with is using a server at home for development. For a while I had a service that provided DNS so my domain name would resolve, (a third party service that acts connects the DHCP dynamic address dished out by the phone/cable company
and mates it to a static address on their nameserver)... This used to cost about $5/mo and gave me the luxury of a dedicated IP and the low cost of residential IP connectivity.

I hear ya. The room I use as my "datacenter" is a small room, about 5ft wide and about 12 ft long. It has a conventional rack that you would buy from a diy or hardware store. I adjusted the shelve heights to acomodate a pc style computer case. so i have 2 boxes top and 2 cased bottom. There is than a smaller gap to the bottom shelve where my routers and network stuff is located, That is my datacenter :) It's quite amazing just how warm it can get in there. I installed a conventional household fan pointing up behind the servers to carry as much of the hot air away.

I also swear by webmin. It has several really nice features. One thing I like is being able to log in over the web and log into any server on the network, even of they do not have an external connection. Just scan for webmin servers and register them with your main webmin control panel.

You can get dedicated boxes for under US$100/month these days, including 800GB of bandwidth on multiple high speed links and a 2.4ghz processor with 1gb ram. Not to mention a service level agreement, redundant routers/links, firewall and power backup. It even spares you the cost/hassle of hardware failure, as it's their problem as they own the hardware.

Also, hosting from home would severely limit your outbound connection speed as most 'high speed' residential internet connections have relatively low speed 'outbound' speeds. For example 512k ADSL only has 128K outbound which would be fine for a small web sites but probably not anything getting more than 50,000 hits a day.

Even a couple of hundred buccks a month is a lot to throw at a hoby site with no return.

If I was doing a project like this, and it was to be commercial then I would go with a colocaion or dedicated server provider.

The problem with a dedicated server is that to get the high spec that you want (if you want a high-spec server) with bandwidth and disk (at least in the UK) is still pretty expensive. If you need 2 or more servers then the costs mount up.

In my case I have 2 servers running full time in my garage running off a 2MB unlimited ADSL, but at the moment I need 3/4 terabyte diskspace (and this is growing).

£30 - £50 per month takes care of all that - if I used dedicated servers then my costs would be ten to twentyfold.

Colocation is the only serious alternative for me - I can scrape by until I get the traffic that necessitates a bigger uplink.

The essential differance between the servers with the datacentre and our office, is that we need to provide the infrastructure for the office servers:

- air conditioning
- UPS
- firewall
- multiple isps
- failover & load balancer
- secure area
- spare parts
- wiring

our math is thus showing us that it makes sense to undertake self hosting once you cross 30 servers.

we are of the opinion that self-hosting beyond 30 servers is definetly the way to go. There is a huge cost benefit, and a quality benefit.

There are plenty of inexpensive services out there for web monitoring. If you have a friend or server on another ISP, you can also setup some simple monitoring using a cronjob or open source monitoring tools like Big Brother.

If you are running a web server, the most important thing would be to periodically check that it's returning pages with the right information. You can get much more detailed than that, but you can also infer that if your internet connection is down, the page check from outside will also fail.

As for notification, set things up so that your monitoring emails you details and also emails a short message to your mobile phone. That way when it goes down at 3 am, or when you are out getting a hair cut, you know about it because your phone beeps.

On the practical side, I feel compelled to share my personal experience hosting a site from home that has grown to over 500,000 unique visitors monthly with 5+ million pageviews.

It's a Harry Potter fan site I started in 2002 and originally hosted on a 800MHz server and ADSL connection for $40/mo. I had dreamed of running my own site on my own equipment for a long time and finally did it.

Very quickly, however, it became apparent that both the server and connection would need to be upgraded. I got a SDSL 1.632Mbps which has lasted about a year. I've gone through three self-built servers and just bought a brand new Dell PowerEdge 2850 and am now making the move to a colocation center. The main catalyst for moving was bandwidth and power stability. Datacenters are simply the way to go when you start needing reliability of power and bandwidth (which all equals uptime).

In the grand scheme of things, this was a good path for me to follow personally, but if you have the money up front to buy or lease a server in a datacenter, I highly recommend it. Hosting the site on my own gave me a little more security in knowing I could work on the server right in my basement if anything went wrong, but now that I'm confident of the server's reliability itself, it's a matter of making sure there's reliable power (no outages) and bandwidth (I run at nearly 100% capacity of the SDSL at all times now).

I would like to add a word about powers. In most homes and offices we don't realise that the meter provided is of a limited capacity. If you were too add several servers, and the infrastructure to go with it, you would need to ask the power company to upgrade your meter. And do it in advance, cause they can take a few days.

I have a Dell 2650 Dual 2.6G processors, 5 36G hard drives, 1.5G of Ram, RAID, etc., etc., which I thought I needed to have to host all my own sites on.

I wanted the big daddy. I colocated it and it ended up costing me at minimum 300 a month, sometimes up to 700. I was getting jobbed.

Now, I'm paying 130 a month for all my sites.

Anyway, I have this big daddy server sitting in my dining room, collecting dust. Would it be possible for me to host four new websites from home using this server?

The problem I will obviously have is connection speed. I'm using SBC Yahoo DSL right now and I can up the bandwidth both ways for 20 bucks a month or so...

Would a visitor to that page see a page that loads at an acceptable rate? Say a 10kb page? Let's say I'm getting 800 unique visitors a day to the server who view 3 pages per person.

What else can I do with this server aside from selling it on Ebay and hoping to get back what I owe.

Your main problem is always going to be maximum concurrent users due to the fact that most residential services have relatively smaller up pipes.

But, that doesn't generally become a problem until you're getting lots of hits.

well, thats not counting all other traffic and TCP overhead.

plus, when spider from google/yahoo/etc. hit your site, they most likely put N page from your site (that they plan to index) in a pool and give those to M spiders who will access it in parallel. this is in addition to whatever traffic human visitor/other bots brings to your site.

I hosted from home in around 1995, and I did it for 5 years. Currently I am a hosting provider and I lease the servers.

Leasing is a much better deal because of the issues already mentioned such as having someone else always upgrading your software, actual redundant load balanced backbone connections, automatic backups stored offsite, lower costs, 24 hour support staffs, backup power generation, and the list goes on...

As for how many sites you can host on a server at home or away, most people use less than 50MB of space on a large site and less than 500MB (way less) of transfer. But they over estimate thier usage by a factor of about 100 unless they are streaming or storing graphics/music.

Someone in this thread mentioned 3/4 terrabite, I can't even imagine using that much storage space. That would hold everything I will see in my entire life (or about 75 years worth) at 250x250px @60 FPS

Databases can also get quite large.

The people in this forum are probably an exception to this rule.

Agreed, thats why the start > control pannel part was explaining how to set up a windows pc to live on the same lan your servers (linux) when you require static ip assignment to all systems within your network, when not running DHCP from the router.