Setting Up a Web Server

[tliss]

Doug or anyone else...

I am exploring the possibility of putting up a small web server to host a couple of web sites we are putting together. I'm starting to investigate what I would need to do this. Thoughts? What hardware, software and service would I need? Would it just be better and more cost effective to go to one of those commercial hosting services? I don't figure there will be a huge amount of traffic and I'm not really planning to use it for money making or anything like that. Just a simple server hosting a few web sites.

Help!

Thanks,
Tom

[Silver_2000]

Is this personal ? Or business

You could become a reseller on this server for reasonable price - have the ability to manage your own work and accounts - Send me a email with the amount of disk space and bandwidth you think you need - server is based on Cpanel - you would have both Cpanel and WHM access - you can see the interface demos at CPanel.net

There is NO question its cheaper to get an account on a hosted server - unless your budget is in the 300-500 a month range

[tliss]

It's mainly for my wife's cake decorating business. She's been hounding me to put together a web site for her and now I'm getting to a point where I can begin exploring options. I'm just weighing the pros and cons of hosting my own server versus having it hosted elsewhere. As far as size and whatnot, I woudln't expect it to get too out of hand, but I would definitely like the option to be able to increase size as necessary. I look at it as an opportunity to possibly host other sites later on, as you said.

I am just barely starting to look into this, so you'll have to bear with me as I am definitely not up to speed on all of this stuff. I'll get there eventually. It's all ready starting to sound like a hefty investment, so I migth just have it hosted for starters and continue looking into my own server in the future.

In any case, what would I need to start up a small, scaleable server? I have no hardware or software, so this would be from scratch.

Thanks,
Tom

[Silver_2000]

One reason not to use your own hardware is a decent server class machine will cost at least $1400 and in 12 months its OLD - you can rent a dedicated server for $150 or so - But $25 a month will get you started on a shared host like mine or any of the others

If you host it at home you need BIG upload and redundant internet and power and if it goes down when you arent there then its down till you get back

Another reason not to host is you wont have the $10K ddos equipment to prevent attacks from taking down your sites

while you are shopping keep in mind there is NO such thing as unlimited - it simply doesnt exist - there are always small print limits - they just limit things that they dont list - sql connection limits or cpu limits are very common - you will never be able to use any bandwidth without hitting the other limits

[tliss]

OK, you have convinced me that I should not put up my own server. :icon_eek: Sounds like a giant pain in the ass to me. Now I'm in search of hosting sources...shoot me an e-mail with your pricing: tliss@tx.rr.com.

I'll eventually be putting up 2 small business sites and probably a single site related to my family genealogy activity. At this point I have nothing developed and don't plan on making anything really big or elaborate...just a site giving some business info and some photos.

Thanks,
Tom