If so, I'd be very interested in hearing about your hardware setup, performance, etc., as well as why you chose to do your own hosting rather than use a commercial alternative?
Thank you,
Ed
Thank you,
Ed
Do you host a commercial website from your home?
- Thread starter Ed_Flecko
- Start date
I have no idea why anyone would do this! Hosting is pretty cheap, the companies that host support the operating system and have backup sites, UPS. Its easy for them to create a hosting environment and then clone it a thousand or ten thousand times. If you host at your house you will need to open up ports on your router. Something most people in the know try and avoid.
Exactly.
Plus, your home internet connection typically lacks redundancy. And if you invest in redundancy, it'll cost you more than what it'd cost you to have it hosted in the cloud.
Also, that’s a 24/7 job.
Years ago I ran the BITOG server (in a hosting center) from soup to nuts. I did this for about 10 years and finally gave the server management over to a hosting company. The job of maintaining the server, upgrades, security updates, disaster recovery, etc. becomes consuming. It was hard to go on vacation and not worry about "what if." It's still a lot of work and ultimately I still watch all of these items to make sure they get done, but the gray cloud of DR is no longer my job and that's a relief.
If it's a hobby website and you don't mind downtime, then host it at home, but for the prices of space on a shared server, I have no idea why you would. For a commercial server that needs to be up all the time, never from home.
Many ISP's have policies preventing this; sometimes to the point of blocking ports 80 and 443. You'd also "need" a static IP which is rare for consumer ISP plans. (You could use a Dynamic DNS service, I suppose; but that just adds another layer of "things that can and will at some point fail" and would almost certainly increase network latency.)
I have three servers, all VM's in a faraway data centre. I am constantly monitoring them and would *love* to have a real piece of hardware in my home instead; but unless I spring for a prohibitively-expensive internet connection and a lot of redundant hardware it is light years from being worth it.
With all that said, if your commercial site has low to moderate traffic and you planned out some quality caching/ CDN (Cloudflare offers a great free tier) I suppose you could make it swing. I'd get a very capable server for whatever my budget allowed for and install ProxMox on it, and use that to create some virtual machines (I'd go Ubuntu LTS or CentOS). You wouldn't need a load balancer and you could probably get by with the web and database server on the same VM. I'd have a firewall in front of it and a steady backup plan in place. If you intend to access the server remotely I would read up a lot on hardening SSH.
If you'd be running the mail server for your domain in the same "domestic data centre" you'll have some more security complexities and research on your plate.
I have three servers, all VM's in a faraway data centre. I am constantly monitoring them and would *love* to have a real piece of hardware in my home instead; but unless I spring for a prohibitively-expensive internet connection and a lot of redundant hardware it is light years from being worth it.
With all that said, if your commercial site has low to moderate traffic and you planned out some quality caching/ CDN (Cloudflare offers a great free tier) I suppose you could make it swing. I'd get a very capable server for whatever my budget allowed for and install ProxMox on it, and use that to create some virtual machines (I'd go Ubuntu LTS or CentOS). You wouldn't need a load balancer and you could probably get by with the web and database server on the same VM. I'd have a firewall in front of it and a steady backup plan in place. If you intend to access the server remotely I would read up a lot on hardening SSH.
If you'd be running the mail server for your domain in the same "domestic data centre" you'll have some more security complexities and research on your plate.
Although I wouldn't use one for a dynamic site for commercial purposes, Google Cloud Compute has a "free tier" virtual machine that'd serve up static sites (with some help from Cloudflare) and make an awesome test bed for learning, testing, research and general target practice. Check out their "f1-micro" VM: You are essentially provisioned 1/5 of a CPU thread, 600MB RAM, 30GB HDD and 1GB of outgoing bandwidth/ month. You can even reserve a static IP address for free. I believe there is also 5GB of snapshot storage.
(I actually use one of these to SSH into my other servers: Because I can get a free static IP I can then allow only that IP to SSH into the servers. I also run the synthing file sync software on it to sync files between 5 computers and it works great!)
We do appreciate your efforts for this! Glad you've been able to move on from this.
I wm a Weebly site for a not for profit. All free. Can't figure out why anyone would want to host.
Hosting your own site, if even on a shared plan, gives you some more control over how you modify the code of the platform and even which plugins and add-ons you can use.
Hosting your own site on a VM instead of shared or other managed hosting gives you the same expanse of control over the server environment.
I tried setting up security camera remote viewing and it is already a PITA with residential internet. Imagine doing web hosting over residential grade internet would be likely bad if you are competing upload bandwidth with the 200 other zoom school kids and webex office workers from home.
Providers throttle upload speed IMHO to prevent hosting. It world but at the painful speeds.
example my ISP is 225Mbps down/5 up. 5 is slow for ISP.
example my ISP is 225Mbps down/5 up. 5 is slow for ISP.
If you want a secure website, you wouldn't do this. Its a full time job as others have said trying to secure every communications layer.
I have a small handful of servers in the cloud that I use to serve websites that I develop. I would love to host them from my home but my internet service provider does not offer static IP addresses. Otherwise, I am entirely confident that I would be able to run my network at home securely. (I would still use a CDN and Cloudflare, and those cloud-based pieces are major pieces of the puzzle from both performance and security standpoints.)
Having said that, I have done the math and the power bill alone almost makes it not worth my while financially. I appreciate that cloud providers such as Amazon, Google, Oracle, Microsoft, etc have purpose built infrastructure and efficient cooling and power.
While I wouldn’t host a commercial web site from home -lots of labor involved- I do not appreciate the fact that is so convenient to hire those folks.
Running a home server ought to be a “convenient “ as running a lemonade stand, yet our wonderful nomenklatura has made it so expensive it’s no brainer to hire them [insert your favorite insult]
Two cents worth of nothing.
