[Gllug] Hosting from home

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Tue, 2002-10-01 at 20:31, Garry Heaton wrote:

> I hear a lot about running servers on old, cheap hardware but doesn't
> this affect:
> 
> - disk access speed if the HD is old?
> - memory performance if the RAM is old spec?

Yes, it does. Whether that actually matters is another story

> If it really is possible to use such old hardware without performance
> being affected too much on small sites

If you're hosting on ADSL, your max outgoing bandwidth is 256Kbps. A 486
can saturate that with no trouble. You'll only hit the limitations of
you hardware if you're doing really intensive stuff - trying to run a
database backed dynamic mod_perl site on a 486 with 32Mb of RAM would be
apinful, but the same box could easily max your line serving static html
and images. Of course if you're serving 200 simultaneous clients, you'll
have grief....

> then I plan to set-up a network
> with seperate boxes for:
> 
> - Firewall
> - Web server
> - Database server
> - Log server

A modest spec will be adequate. For a small home network (3 users), I
run a Pentium 233 MMX with 96Mb of RAM, and software raid 5. That does
routing & firewalling on an ADSL line, runs an IMAP server & sendmail, a
squid cache, and snort. Handles the load quite happily. In the past I've
also run a webmail interface to the IMAP store on it as well, but no
longer use that - ssh & mutt is less hassle.

Mike.


-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug