Setting up own server for websites (not smart?)
 

Hello all.. i hope this is the correct forum for inquiries like this.

I currently have three very small / simple websites running, but would like to be able to add mp3 and 16/44 audio downloads from one of them.
I also have a mac sitting in my machine room, that acts as an FTP server for my studio, so i wanted to ask if someone could give me an idea (or point me in the direction of such info) of what it would take to set all this hosting up on my own machine(s).

The way i see it, if i setup one G5 with apache / php / mysql and oscommerce (not soo simple, i know) and put the three websites, as well as the (Rumpus) ftp on there, the 'only' question is, can i get a dsl / t1 connection to my house that will handle this data?

Which brings me to the question: how much bandwidth would i need / how much bandwidth does an mp3 download take?

What's a good rule of thumb?
How much bandwidth do these website hosting companies usually offer for their clients?

Is this something i might be wasting money and time on, and should have a dedicatd hosting firm do for me, or is it a viable option?

Thank you for your time!

Husky

Your first problem is going to be dealing with your ISP handing you a DHCP address. You need a static address or something like dyndns to keep track of what ever address you are given. For small scale personal use, your setup will work. But you will quickly run into bandwidth and availability issues if you are trying any sort of commercial use.

Not to mention the fact that most ISPs explicitly forbid running any kind of internet server on their consumer connections (including most P2P uses) and may even go so far as to block the ports most commonly associated with such server applications.

You can get a Virtual Private Server through any one of many hosting providers these days and for as little as around $30. For small sites, these accounts are just fine and provide all the flexibility you might need, plus the option to grow as you need it. It also frees up your internet service at home for your own personal use rather than being swallowed up by server traffic.

Interesting.. even something like this would not work??

http://www.covad.com/services/index.html

H

If you're willing to pay for a business connection to your home for this purpose, something like what you've linked to would work fine (these are not consumer connections), and a G5 with a decent amount of RAM dedicated to serving webpages is probably more powerful than a lot of the machines you'll get on a cheap VPS account. Clearly, if this is something you're considering (i.e. T1 or business DSL) the $30 for cheap VPS hosting is not a critical concern?

Well.. like i said, i'm doing the legwork right now.
Not entirely sure this is the best idea, intriguing as it may seem..

Maybe the money spent (potentially) on DSL+ or T1 is better on a dedicated commercial sever.. and potentially a fairly robust one at that.

Any recomendations? Speakeasy?
I don't recall these hosts ever giving out info re. the download speeds ..

Of course, another major concern (i reckon) is the fact that my upload speeds (typically much slower than dl) will be the bottleneck for my clients, right??

So.. a 6 or 8M dl service will probably never to past 1m upload, correct??

H

Far be it from me to make recommendations for a commercial webhosting company. Speakeasy is a fairly well known player and they do offer dedicated servers. As you've stated, they don't make their own connection speeds well known, but they (large hosting companies) are generally connected to large backbones that can handle a lot of traffic. The biggest bottleneck would be the bandwidth allocated to your account and the capabilities of the server, i.e cpu and memory, etc.

If you get a consumer internet connection at home, you're right in that you'll get an asymmetric connection which will give you pretty good downstream but pretty sad upstream, which is the purpose of this whole exercise. A business account on the other hand, even if it's asymmetric, should have significantly higher upstream (but still maybe not enough). If you get a dedicated T1, though, I'd be one angry puppy if it wasn't full duplex.

I'm guessing you already have some form of broadband at home and are talking of bringing a second line dedicated to your hosting activities. Again, to do this, you'd really need a business line, which typically cost at least 60% more than a consumer line and don't necessarily offer much higher speeds than their consumer counterparts, or full duplex. A T1, after the possibly substantial cost of installation and hookup would probably run, geez i dunno, at least $250-$300/month (?). For that much, you can get a pretty nice dedicated server (obviously better than the virtual dedicated that you can get for as low as $30 from GoDaddy for example).

In my personal opinion, to equal the capabilities of a decent dedicated hosting account, you'd have to spend considerably more. The hosting providers defer these costs by spreading them out across all of their customers and over time, so it costs each customer a fraction of what it would cost them to obtain the same capabilities on their own. Add in the "value-added" services you get and it generally makes more sense to go with one of these guys than to go it alone. Although it would be a lot more fun and interesting to do it all yourself from your own house.:cool:

I run the company's web and email server off of a Mini and a cable connection. It's occasionally slow but in general it's fine. However, we don't have multimedia downloads. We do have a pretty large amount of (junk) email but that's download, not up. The address is basically static - hasnt changed in so many months I'm being very lazy writing the dyndns update routine.

So, it's certainly possible but I agree with the others that if you need a lot of bandwidth you should use a commercial host. There's tons to choose from and they relieve you of many headaches.

With lots of traffic, you're better off setting up your own hoster. A commercial service will be horrendously expensive.

Otherwise, hosting services are so incredibly cheep these days, there's no sense in not using them. I use Bizarre-Host and MaxieHost.

There's a balance there - enough traffic to raise your bandwidth costs at a commercial host (many of which provide 500Gb/month for the cheapest plans and terabytes for the larger packages) will be more than enough to swamp your home connection uplink and get the attention of your ISP.

check this out

www.phpwebhosting.com

heard nothing but great things, and its only $10/month

Thanks for all the info!!

Now that i'm back - and having had Verizon drop my dsl over the long weekend, and just get it fixed today (!) - the question kinda answered itself!!

Off to read up on ISP's.

Husky

Verizon sucks all-around.

http://www.thelist.com/

.. and the only game in town, here.

rats.

Oh come on... L.A.?

Use my link above.

Or how about QueerWire, er, ClearWire?

Looked at Clearwire.. only up to 2MB though.

Right now - having had problems (again) over the weekend with Verizon, with analog phone AND DSL, i'm thinking maybe i should look for a small business ISP and a Multi Domain Webhost.

The problem is that Verizon being the only game in town, for phone, i got the email and isp from them as well.

I'm sure it's just a matter of time - just need to sift through a myriad of options.
Ironically i figured that Verizone being 'large' they'd be reliable..
doooh.

H

Only 2Mb? You have high standards. Can't be getting that now on DSL.

Verizon has secret rooms in their traffic centers in which H0meland S3curity has set up machines that examine all the traffic that goes through. So does AT&T. They also roll over to any warrantless request for customer info, unlike some of the smaller carriers. Check out the Military Commissions Act and the "Protect America" Act for more info on how this can happen. We no longer have habeus corpus or any privacy in our communications, financial, or medical records. The Constitution has been effectively rescinded.

As far as i can tell (speed tests etc from Speakeasy and others).. when the DLS is working (haha) it's btw 2.3 and 2.9 Mbps. (of course this is the 'premium pkg from Verizon - and i'm talking downloads).

That's plenty for me here at home / at the office.
I would, however, not mind finding:

A - a reliable ISP that will acutally run another dedicated line to the house.. i thing a lot of the problems i'm having with Verizon is based on the old infrastucture in the neighborhood.. i'm towards the LA Nat'l forest.

B - a reliable Host that will allow me three domain names (or more) AND email acounts - which i reckon they all do - where i can put my three sites, PLUS my digital media downloads store (what i was considdering hosting myself originally).

that way i could dump verizon and just use the analog phone service from them.
(until i go to VoIP, of course... hmm..)


Good point on the Homl. Seq. too! Scary, but good.

Best

H

Your requirements again seem to be pulling you towards commercial hosting. A decent dedicated account will afford you everything you asked for and more. For example, on a dedicated account (let's say somewhere between $150-$250 per month variety, ballpark) you can get a core 2 duo machine all to yourself with probably 1GB of RAM. You will have your choice of some nice linux distros like RedHat, etc. and will have full control over the machine. You typically get 3 dedicated IPs but you can host as many websites on those IPs as you wish (with just a little bit of apache gymnastics), as you have full control over DNS, Apache, etc. You can stream any kind of content you want, you can install proprietary servers if you have licenses (i.e. JRun, CF, Quicktime Streaming Server, whatever) It will be connected to the host's high speed backbone. The only question is, what speed will your users get on the other end and will the speed be consistent and reliable. That I can't answer. Its probably a good idea to ask this of a potential host. I can say from experience, though, that my websites, given moderate to low volume, generally provide decent download speeds (300Kb+) even on "cutrate" hosts.

Having a second line (and a business line at that) run to your house WILL be costly. However, you may not need to physically have a second line run. You could simply open another account with your current provider, or get a line with a different provider. In my home, I can have Verizon DSL, Comcast, and will have access to FIOS (reportedly) within 2-3 months. If I wanted to, I could conceivably have an account with all three at the same time:eek:. Depending on where you live, you may have more or fewer options, but you prob'ly already know this.

Been back and forth (and back..) in the last few days. Phew!

At this point, what seems to be the best solution is inMotionhosting.com
They offer 900GB of storage space and 9000GB montly downloads.
They will also allow multiple sites on the same account - something my current host will not.
All this for rougly 19 bucks per month.

At this point i'll probably stick with Verizon for phone and home dsl, although i'll probably move my business email(s) to the me@mydomain.com email service, at the host i end up at.

Thanks again!

H

Darth Fader

Seriously, check out the hosting link I posted above. A good friend of mine is a web developer by trade and he uses them exclusively and says they rock.

I'll post the link again

www.phpwebhosting.com

I told him about mine too, but he just didn't check ours out for some reason.

2Mb is a high standard??? I have 40 down and over 10 up, consistently. Home fibre is A Good Thing. Only $40 a month. Faster than the office server (#8 above) but the 4 hour IP lease makes a home server rather impractical.

You are very fortunate acme; but surely you know how rare home fibre is?

Or are you suggesting we dig our own trenches from the PoP to our house? Maybe we could hook up all our neighbors while we're at it?

Moving from the backwaters of the Prairies to urban Tokyo does have it's advantages :D

"Digging your own trenches" is kind of what happens with fibre here. An apartment building will arrange for a single fibre drop and then use ADSL to the individual units. As the distance is only hundreds of meters the speed over copper remains high, and if it's a large enough building the provider will often install for free just for the future business. We've got several companies actively competing for customers so it's usually a quick process.

Back in the 'old' country, farmers would quite literally dig their own trenches with their backhoe. The power/phone company can then just drop the wire in, saving Old MacDonald a very substantial amount of money. Even cheaper if Old MacD buys the cable and drops it in himself, just leave the trench open for inspection.

Are you right in Seattle? Long time ago I knew someone in Kapowsin who was running an early Satellite internet. Stuck with telephone upload, but decent downstream performance. And the content was a bit harder to trace :rolleyes:

Yep, right in Seattle proper. Got cable at ~4.5Mb with the hated Crumcast. I was commenting on his considering 2Mb a high standard. How likely is it that he could have that on DSL? Whatever, I don't care enough.

I used to run an optical networking company, and my intent was to link fiber PoPs to outlying high-net-worth subscribers, like stock brokers and lawyers. It was MRV laser transmitter/receivers through the air; very secure, but limited by fog/rain, and with distance constraints. Basically last mile. But then I got mashed by low-cost wifi. I wasn't willing to compete in commoditized wifi, as I'd never been treated with less respect as as a networking vendor; my prior field had been real estate. (and I'm old)

I'd thought about running fibre through high-value corridors. There's a machine which pushes a pipe underground horizontally, which you can steer to avoid other utilities. It obviates the need for open trenches and all the disruption. But I went back into real estate instead, and I think I'll die practicing real estate.

Ok.. easy now.

I checked out the Maxie and Bizarre.. as well as PHPHost (i've been waiting for an email back from them, which just came in a little while ago).

I've also been to about 150 other websites, looking at Hosts, Shopping Carts, Merchant Accounts, ISP's etc etc.

I am doing this research along with my full time job, so sorry if you got the impression i was ignoring your advice.
Far from it. That's why i'm here!

The Maxie and Bizarre hosts do not have enough space and / or enough bandwidth for me, and in the email from PHP they pretty much seconded that. They offer 1G of space 'with room to grow' ... but not much.

Like i said - this is a lot of research for me, and i am thankful for every piece of information, for sure.

In order to be able to handle music downloads (mp3, AAC, FLAC, apple lossless and 16 bit 44.1k) as well as music videos and short films ( in various resolutions ) and photos.. i will need a fairly robust setup, i gather.
Mind you, this is all coming together as we 'speak' so bear with me.
(until a few days ago i didn't even know that i could get a host to allow me multiple sites on one account).

Like i said, i did find a couple of hosts that offer 900GB of space andd 9000GB of bw.. and i'm going to look into them.
I posted the name of the one i liked most, here on the forum, in case someone had heard of them (good or bad) - as some of the hosts i found have customers making dedicated (!) websites to vent about the shitty service they provided.. and that's on one of the 'top ten' ones!

Best

Husky

I am still astounded with the amount of space I get on Maxie, much less for about 20 bucks a year. And I'm running 4 websites from it.

I wasn't clear on the magnitudes more space you'll need, and do not understand how you can substantiate the cost for a commercial account to serve others music? Then again I'd never consider advertising from that-search-engine-everybody-uses because of their atrocious privacy practices. They keep every search ever done, associated with IP, as well as all mail and listserv traffic. Why? There is no justification other than data-mining. No thanks, I am happy with my meta-search engine, which over the past couple of years has proven every bit as thorough.

Whups, went off on another tangent.