i have this idea for a website and i want to start out by hosting it from home..

anyone want to suggest a hardware setup i should use or would a general gaming computer do the trick?

if the site does become sucessful i'll be moving to a dedicated server in a managed data centre but i want something to kick me off

General gaming PC would be fine.

HFS is a handy little program (it's like the utorrent of webservers) if you don't need a server with any complexity.

Depending on size, your ISP probably provide you with 10-50MB of web space that you could host it on easily enough.

Hosting it on a normal computer would be fine... just make sure you have backup's... the only thing i would consider is Raid 5 or something... just to be safe :)

anyone want to suggest a hardware setup i should use or would a general gaming computer do the trick?

run a ram drive as your primary hdd in a virtual machine. the most expensive servers I build still can't compete with the power the average old P4 desktop delivers from a setup such as this. How can they? Your only limitation is your home connection's bandwidth, the amount of ram you have and your ability to configure a working virtual machine that will work with it.

It's easier than it sounds eh. just play with it dude

last edited by koopz at 22:58:09 12/Aug/08

i run exchange and iis off an old p4 box. runs fine, never have to reboot it.

If you can host it on Linux, I'd suggest building a cheap Linux box similar to the hosting provider you invisage hosting it on in the fututre for easy migration. That way you can get one of those Antec silent cases and leave it on 24/7 and not hear the noise of a computer being on all the time.

Not a big fan of microsoft web servers.

If you just want to host website, it won't need to powerful, just get the silent case and silent CPU cooler. Been there, worked well.

koopz how much ram would you need for that?

Superform... Unless you're expecting thousands and thousands of hits, I wouldn't worry too much about a RAM drive.

Your upstream bandwidth will be the biggest bottleneck.

The average PC will be able to host for a a number of concurrent users. If you're looking at more than that, I'd spend the money for some professional hosting.

last edited by mongie at 12:46:28 13/Aug/08

i would be expecting anywere between 0-50000 hits a month.. and i'll need to serve a few meg of flash content to each

also we have 20/10 adsl so to start off with i'm hoping it will be enough..

i have been looking into some of the server setups which allow up to 64gig ram.. but it might be too costly at a rough price i saw about 4000 euro..

dedicated hosting would then be cheaper

a typical linux setup will cache those sort of things automatically anyway, so a ram drive is a waste of time.

I'd just get some shared hosting...

Lol @ ram drive and virtual machine suggestions.

a typical linux setup will cache those sort of things automatically anyway, so a ram drive is a waste of time.

I have to agree. Most modern operating systems keep previously accessed file data in RAM for re-use, that's why you always see most of your memory eaten up by "System Cache" in Windows for example:

http://homepage.powerup.com.au/~boldajis/images/mem.png

Thing is, contrary to initial opinions, that's not a bad thing and there isn't much of a penalty having all your remaining ram automatically used up like that. If a real program wants to use up some memory, the OS will gladly insta-free that memory and hand it to the program to use. Otherwise there's no harm keeping data in memory in the event you might want to use it later, but able to be purged at a moment's notice.

This is ignoring any caching that a web-server does itself, which I'd imagine would only make it more silly to use a ram-drive.


last edited by parabol at 16:10:30 13/Aug/08

I'd just get some shared hosting...

quote for truth. you can get decent cheap hosting from midphase or dreamhost for like $65 bucks for a year and the uptime/speed is pretty great. obviously if your site gets popular you'll need to move on up but its the same deal as hosting at home.

I was running a puiblic wordpress, gallery2, phpbb set up on an old athlon 1.2Ghz box with 2Gb ram for about 6yrs and never had any major issues with load so any standard rig these days should cope. As long as you keep an eye on ram / cpu usage and just up it if you need to, it should be fine at home to start with. If you're expecting upto 50,000 hits a month, i'd be considering some kind of sata ncq raid option that can cope with lots of multiple reads, but that's just me. I definitely wasn't getting 50,000 hits a month but it was doing a bit.

Software wise, I tend to go with a LAMP servers as they're easy to set up and pretty universal. You can do this on either Windows or Linux (Note windows version is called WAMP). I prefer linux personally for this sort of thing but I've also run it up on windows and it was very straight forward. There's a lot of good web apps that use this model, e.g. apache/mysql/php model and can then easily plug into any website you're building.

If you can host it on FreeBSD, I'd suggest building a cheap FreeBSD box similar to the hosting provider you invisage hosting it on in the fututre for easy migration. That way you can get one of those Antec silent cases and leave it on 24/7 and not hear the noise of a computer being on all the time.

Not a big fan of Linux web servers.

Edit: Dedicated hosting for 50,000 hits a month? Pft. I was doing twice that per day on shared hosting.

last edited by Raven at 16:21:48 13/Aug/08