[Gllug] Hosting from home

[Mark Lowes]

On Tue, 2002-10-01 at 20:31, Garry Heaton wrote:
> Does anyone have any experience of hosting from home via an ADSL
> connection? Yes, I know there are upstream bandwidth limitations but I'm
> really looking at getting some practice hosting a couple of small sites
> since I do mainly web development but would like to broaden my sysadmin
> skills.

On first point, don't host anything which is critical or important on an
ADSL line or anything which can't bear to be offline for up to a week. 
Despite what some of my customers think ADSL isn't a leased line and
it's not got the same levels of service from BT.

> 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?

If you're just playing then a 486 will do most of what you need unless
you're really starting to hit some interesting development ideas.  I do
most of my internal test hosting / playing on this box which is a celery
500 + 192Mb, it tends to choke a little when I'm thrashing it but for
most purposes it's fine.

> If it really is possible to use such old hardware without performance
> being affected too much on small sites then I plan to set-up a network
> with seperate boxes for:

"without performance being affected too much", you've not defined what
levels of service you're expecting to be giving.  If your users are
expecting top flight performance then the ADSL is going screw you from
day one without any help from your local hardware.  However if they
understand that this hosting is on a network which might disappear for a
week (BT is wonderful) and it primarily just so you can play then a
decent P<something> with ram and a disk should handle the hosting side.

> - Firewall

P75 running ipcop, sorted.

> - Web server
> - Database server
> - Log server

Is this a play network or an ISP? :)

> 
> Any suggestions?
> 
> Garry Heaton
> 
> 
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