Host my own site?

Any advantages?

[gussie]

I am starting a new business, and I will sell about 1200 items per month stricly over the internet. In my long association with the internet, I have always had my sites hosted by a giant web hosting service, and had no problems.

I'm curious. Why do people host their own sites? What are the advantages? Is that something I might benefit from? Do I need to know PHP, ASP, Perl or some such? Can I run my site totally from my desktop?

In the interest of complying with the KISS principle, I will probably have my site hosted by the giant web hosting service. But I'm still curious...

Any discussion or redirection will be appreciated
Gussie

[moltar]

There are few pros and cons for hosting on your own:

Pros:

• Full flexibility (you can install/delete any applications you want. you can have any OS you want.)
  
• Depending on the area where you live, it can be cheaper. (E.g. if you live in big city, where Internet connections are generally cheaper.)
  
• You are the boss, of your server.
  

Cons:

• Matter of reliability. (E.g. what if you connection goes down? What about power outages?)
  
• Are you tech-savvy? Can you admin your own server? If not, then you might need to hire someone.
  
• You need to buy your own hardware (Server, router, power backups, etc...)
  

I am sure others can think of more. This is just of the top of my head.

You might consider renting a server from some big company with full support. If you have several websites that you pay for each hosting separately, it might even come out cheaper. But you still have full control of your server.

[Oaf357]

I think the biggest problem would be bandwidth.

The costs and making sure you have enough available could be a very daunting task.

Then uptime would be a huge concern. The only way you can say you can guarantee 99.9% uptime is if you have diesel generators parked outside.

[mack]

I think if you are happy with your provider you might want to stick with them. That way when something goes wrong it is your hosts responsability to get the issue resolved. With self hosting that responsability lies with you.

Mack.

[fabfurs]

Self-hosting the buck stops here!

You are ultimately responsible for the following:
uptime
backups
bandwidth
disaster recovery
power conditioning
WAN fault-tolerance
and so much more.....

You can get great pleasure from doing it all yourself but this is an area often outsourced. Make sure to analyze your uptime needs if your site is mission-critical to your business because even an 99% uptime guaranty means that your site can be down for 3.5days in a year.

[gussie]

You guys are right, as usual :)

Thanks for the input!

Gussie

[zendak]

I don't know what hosting model you've been using so far but there are basically three models to choose from.

Virtual hosting: Your web space shares the same server with other clients of the hosting company. This is usually the cheapest but you may lack high performance as there are usually hundreds of other clients running their web space on the same machine.

Dedicated server: You own or rent the hardware and are responible for administration, backups, etc. as mentioned before in this thread. No one else is on your machine so you have full control and the highest possible performance. More bandwidth. Downside: The risk of something going wrong if you're not technically experienced as an admin, plus higher costs.

Managed hosting/server: Same as dedicated server but your set-up is monitored and administered by an admin emplyed by the hosting company. Good balance between performance, security and comfort for you as site owner. This may be the ideal thing for you especially if you run e-commerce.

[DeathShadow]

Running your own in home servers can be very risky if you do not know anything about securing them. If you were to put your company on an apache server with no changes (if you did change things hope they are the right settings) to the configuration or any other server for that matter an attacker could bring that server to its knees in a matter of seconds. Another thing to secure is the over all network structure itself. You need some type of primary gateway filtering/monitoring method such as SPI or IDS systems. Don't get me wrong/discouraged network security is a never ending education process; most administrators running the top hosting companies do not know the first thing about it.... Id also advise leaving financial transactions off your servers and let another company such as yahoo take care of them. This will save your ass if any legal issues come up pertaining to stolen money because some snot nosed kid on your subnet sniffed the account information and broke the encryption algorithm.

The other things to worry about are:

1. Speed/bandwidth - if you have a high speed connection at home, look into a business class version you’re ISP (Road Runner) may be able to offer you.
2. Hardware - don't slack on your server(s), you should have redundant power supplies/drives, UPSs, Regular backup server(s), a decent clock/FSB speed, and lots of RAM to protect against resources being used up during high traffic periods and certain DoS/DDoS attacks. Cooling is also an issue to be looked at; air-conditioning and proper system cooling is a must when running these babies 24/7 365 (366 leap years).
3. Will you be home if something does go wrong? Drives do fail, systems do lock up, and routers/nodes need to be reset sometimes. Remember you will need to be your own administrator here...

PS: If anyone has a home server and would like to contact me to test if an attacker can take it down in "seconds" let me know. Id be happy to help out and show you that it can be done/how to fix it.

Email: [e-mail]

[adfree]

Using your own server for testing, staging could be very rewarding. For mission critical stuff (production, meaning live site) you might want to trust the pro's for security and updates, backup's, monitoring, fast reaction to issues, etc.

But again, anything you want to really thoroughly play with (and you should NEVER play at a production server) an own server on the side might come in handy.

It also could be a great learning toy, combine it with homework (reading, getting advice about your config from the pro's, read this board every day) and you should be able to teach yourself and your employees valuable lessons for the future.

[txbakers]

I've hosted my own sites for about 4 years now. I use a small Windows server connected to a DSL. I pay for maximum upload speed.

I've enjoyed the experience. I learned how to administrate a server, create users and passwords, host websites, run a mail server, configure firewalls, deal with hackers and viruses, and really got my fingernails dirty.

This education cost me far less than if I had taken courses, and I have the 4 years experience under my belt. Still, the downsides are all described above. If I'm at my office and the server goes down, I have to rush home to reboot it. All the problems are yours.

Right now, the internet is being plagued with constant attacks from Beagle, Netsky, MiMail, and other viruses. I'm running my Norton every 15 minutes on the mail server directories to try to catch these.

Ultimately I'm going to move to a dedicated, hosted solution somewhere so I can concentrate on sales and marketing and programming. I'm confident enough in my abilities to pass the administrative tasks to a professional.

But I'm glad I did it myself first.

[DeathShadow]

Use Linux or Unix as a Server OS by the way :) What is your website URL txbakers? Id like to check it out.

[txbakers]

I'd like to check it out

Thanks, but I'd rather not be hacked by someone I don't know quite yet. 8)

[lasko]

This is something that I am going to do.

Host all my web sites with my current pro hosting company that way I know I have 99.9% uptime, full support, backups and far better security.

Create my own server with a static IP address of course and use this as a testing server and your admin area to help run your business from anywhere anytime etc.

Most of my sites are now database driven so I am creating my own simple server that doesn't have to be 99% up or have full backups. This gives me a central point to update content and general bits like software, scripts and more. I can then export my database and update my commercial sites whenever.

The good thing about this is I always have everything at hand where ever I am in the world. Plus I am learning as i go along and if you have staff that may need scripts or extra storage space then they only need to access your admin server.

It will be fun learning and after a year or so I may learn enough to run all the hosting myself.

Keep with the pro's but learn on the side :)

Ooops forgot to mention that if you create web sites for other businesses you can put it up for them to see before it goes live or if your waiting for domain names etc.

[DeathShadow]

Good post lasko, I agree. Learn on the side and dont put anything mission critical on your webserver while doing so. Tread in and wade through the shallow waters before you jump into the deep end type thing. No malicious intentions were planned, it is good that you realize a possible threat like that though txbakers.

[ArmedGeek]

I currently host two domains with a handful of subdomains from my home on an AMD 1200 w/ 512MB DDR, 80GB harddrive on a RoadRunner connection. OS is Linux. Server is Apache2

I don't really 'require' 99% uptime, but I rarely have any problems.

I think the largest concern is reliability. If you can stand to be down when the occational catastrophy occurs, then, certainly host yourself. The education you get is priceless.

Good Luck,
ArmedGeek

[percentages]

>I will sell about 1200 items per month stricly over the internet

That is about 1 item sold every 40 minutes (24 hours per day).

How much profit do you make per item?

How much will you lose if your site is down?

Do you really want to be available 24/7/365 to babysit your server?

How much will it cost in time to learn how do deal with all types of attacks?

Running your own server for fun, in your "spare" time, is a great learning experience. But to run your own server from home for an ecommerce site isn't something I would even consider. The costs are thousands of times higher than putting the site on a professionally managed network.

[walkman]

if I was you, NO! Too much time and too many variables (server down, hacking, power issues, hardware etc.). You could lose so much money if any of those happened. Pay the host and let them worry about it.

Use that extra free time to market your site and products. I know, we all know a bit of everything, but one thing I've learned: stick to what you do best. I spent weeks trying to figure out a stupid thing, now I ask for help or pay someone to do it. It makes more sense and I still have a general idea. Ok, I think I do ;)