A webpage for people to view? Well, a friend of mine just put together some spare P3 parts & linux & BAM! got a great little server. He hosts all of my videos w/o any problems.

But it depends on what you want to do. Most ISP's have a "no server" policy, so I'd check. If they do and you STILL want a server, then it's best to keep it on the down low. You know, only a gig xfer out every month.

But using your own computer (that you do other stuff on) is a BAD idea. Build a seperate machine.

> Anyone ( Cheinworks ? ) have any links or info regarding using a computer at home as a dedicated server?

There is some good information at DSL/Cable Webserver. After reading it, I have to agree with BillyBoy; it looks like more trouble than its worth. I’m planning to set up a new web site on Lunarpages.com (I’m using them for another site I manager and they’ve been really great). For $7.95/mo you get 1GB of storage with 40GB data transfer. You can find web hosting cheaper but you get what you pay for. Lunarpages support has been excellent.

~jr

Perhaps I should provide more info on what I would need to do...

It would be a dedicated box. Not using it for anything else. It would have several gigs of video clips on it that people would be downloading.

That link that Jonny posted is looking good....reading now.

My Flash tutorials are on Luna servers. So far they've been a excellent ISP and send an email everytime they make changes, upgrade or are going to be down.

How much space can ya get on those Luna servers Billy ?

Not sure that you necessarily need a "dedicated" sever for what you want to do.

I've put a few sites on HostSave.com, and can't complain. $8/mo for 1GB storage/100GB transfer. $12/mo doubles that. It's shared hosting, but nothing really wrong with that. Actually, I think the advatages outweigh the disadvantages.

I just got the minimum package... I think it was $75 or something like that for a whole year. The only thing I didn't like is they hit my credit card for the annual renewal fee without asking first. Maybe it was in the fine print, that it renews automatically, don't recall. Every other site I ever had up spanning over a dozen ISP's they always send an email FIRST asking if you want to renew. Not a big concern, just rubbed me the wrong way... for about ten seconds.

edit:

Oops, I didn't answer the question. Again, from memory I think it was 800,000 MB storage and they haven't charged for "extra" bandwidth which is nice since many ISP's will nickel and dime you to death. I don't know if its still their policy but they had something up once when they rightfully said so few sites come anywhere near what they would consider excessive use for the handful of clients that do, no big deal.

One thing most of the responses here so far haven't addressed is that if you're interested in hosting your own site and dealing with the tech issues, it's *FUN* to do so! It's a great sense of accomplishment to have your own server completely under your own control. I've been running on an old AMD K6 chip at 300MHz, just now in the process of upgrading to a 1.6GHz Athlon. Of course, your storage space is limited only by the amount of hard drive you feel like paying for. If you're only serving up files then an old 386 with 32MB RAM should be more than sufficient even for the heaviest loads. I'm going for the upgrade because i run a lot of heavy-duty server-end scripts and cgi software. Even still, with a quarter million accesses per day, the ol' 300MHz processor probably ranges about 1 to 5% utilization. It handles the load, it just doesn't respond quite as quickly as i'd like it to during busy times. Test runs on the 1.6GHz box show ranges around 0.1% to 0.3% and response time correspondingly faster. I'm not referring to download speed here, but how soon from sending the request until the server starts answering.

Most DSL providers won't care if you host your own server. You have your own dedicted line from your modem to the telephone company's switch so you're not affecting others if you load your line down. On the other hand, if you use cable then you'll have to get a commercial grade account. Most home cable accounts will be shut down without warning if the ISP detects server traffic. I've got RoadRunner from TimeWarner and i get unlimited transfer for only $25/month more than the home account would cost. Still, even though they don't have a cap on my transfer, the speed of the line effectively limits my traffic to about 9GB/day. The line simply won't move more bits than that. I could upgrade to the next higher service level and get about 35GB/day, but it would add another $160/month and it's not worth that for what i do. We have DSL at work and i estimate we could get about 15GB/day out that line, but it also costs about $15 more per month than my business cable account does.

Ideally you should get a fixed IP address. This makes it easier for DNS systems to keep track of your server. If you have a domain name pointing at your server then every time the address changes the DNS records must be updated and it can take 24 to 72 hours for that change to propogate through the 'net. From a practical standpoint it may not matter I'm on dynamic addressing but my IP address hasn't changed in over 15 months. I do live in a small area though so you should expect more rapid changes in a more metropolitan area. Also, several DNS services (i've used ZoneEdit and can recommend it) over dynamic updates. You run a small program on your server that occasionally reports your current IP address to the DNS servers and they auto-update and broadcast the change in an hour or less. My current DNS servers are at godaddy.com and they broadcast manual changes in about 15 minutes. DSL providers will typically charge $7 to $15/month for a fixed IP address. Cable companies want $130 or more (ick!) so i've stuck with dynamic for now.

If you feel geeky, Linux is a very very good choice for a stable server installation. There are several free distributions available for the downloading. I like RedHat and have been using it for years. Out-of-the-box it will provide the OS, Apache web server, Perl, CGI, Sendmail, FTP, news server, PostgreSQL, and a host of other functions. Most anything else you want it to do is available as free downloads as well.

If you're not feeling geeky, Microsoft offers a couple of free options. Personal Web Server (PWS) under Windows 98SE is a pretty rock solid platform. I ran one of these servers on an old 486DX/66 at work for about 3 years without a reboot. It doesn't handle the fancy stuff and doesn't do CGI, but it does serve up web pages nicely. Windows XP has a watered-down version of IIS built in. Simply set up a "web shared" directory and put files in it; it really is *that* simple.

Oh, and register your domains at GoDaddy.com ... tell 'em Chienworks sent ya! (no, i don't get a commission, but i find their services extremely cheap and flawless so i'll recommend them).

BillyBoy, i've had to institute a 25KBps (200Kbps) rate limit on video downloads because the files are too huge and popular. I can assure you that if VegasUsers.com was a business i'd be on a vastly faster connection. It's just a hobby though, so i'm not paying the extra. Discounting the video files, most everything else on my sites transfers about as fast as any major server location would.