General Discussions

**audiomad** · 10:08 AM

If I was to buy a server and set it up at home how does the bandwidth and connection work?

Do I connect it to the phone on a seperate line will it work with wireless broadband?

**ADAM Web Design** · 04-26-2007, 10:17 AM

You can make it work with anything you want, and you don't need a separate phone line; you can either get a router and open up the ports on it, or you can use Windows Server as a router through RRAS (not sure if Linux can do this or not).

Personally though, I wouldn't do this depending on what it is that you're doing. If it's for testing purposes, that's fine, but anything serious or commercial will choke your bandwidth fairly quickly if you're not careful.

**audiomad** · 04-26-2007, 10:24 AM

how does the band width work? is it down to the phone line or the server its self?

**colbyt** · 04-26-2007, 04:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by audiomad

how does the band width work? is it down to the phone line or the server its self?

Most cable and dsl connections severely restrict the upload bandwidth. It is also aganist most of their TOS to operate a server on your connection. You would also need a static IP address.

Bsaically it just isn't a workable plan.

Hosting is cheap. Buy some if you want to host a site.

**Mattmaul1992** · 04-26-2007, 05:38 PM

Like Adam said for testing/learning purposes it is just fine. Maybe even extremely light personal pages but anything commercial you are going to want a special connection. I'm having the problem of finding a cable-T1 connection in my area that I can get extra bandwidth use so you might have the same problem there.
I saw you had a little trouble understanding what bandwidth (data transfer) is. Well when you entered this page you sent a request to the webmaster-talk server saying I want to download this posts web page. The server sends back an HTML file and then your browser uses the file you downloaded. When you sent the request and then downloaded the resulting page you took bandwidth. Bandwidth is how much data you have sent/received on a connection. Using too much bandwidth at the same time will slow down your ISP's services. Just like when you have way too many programs open on your computer things slow down because data is going everywhere in your computer. It's the same basic principle. The more that is being sent the less that can be sent at that same time.
When you signed up for your internet service they automatically suspect you are going to be using this connection just to be playing games, viewing web pages, etc. In other words they expect a lot of 'packets' (information) to be sent to your computer. But they don't expect you to be using a server. And a server sends a lot of information instead of receiving a lot of information. Upload speeds (sending information) therefore may be slower then download speeds (recieving information). I'm not sure but I'm pretty sure that is how it would probably work. So in the end hosting any site at home would most likely be slow and could get you into trouble with your host because many hosts just outright ban having your own server at home (well hooked to the Internet. You can have your own personal server not hooked to the Internet instead hooked to all your computes by setting up a network. Your own mini Internet.).
Sorry I went on a little too much there. Well hope this helps some.

**audiomad** · 04-27-2007, 04:48 PM

Quote:

I saw you had a little trouble understanding what bandwidth (data transfer) is.

No I understand bandwith just dont know how it works on a server of your own thats all. but thanks guy's for the help.

**ForrestCroce** · 04-28-2007, 04:30 AM

Bandwidth is traffic between the server and the rest of the internet. You would need something more like a T1 connection to run a web site with any realistic traffic.

There's really nothing magic about a server; you can use your computer as one. They tend to have more RAM, faster hard discs, and sometimes lots of CPUs ( although for static html w/o SSL that's really not a problem ), but they're just computers that run a different version of Windows ( 5.2 vs 5.1, I think ). Or some unix derivative. So you've got this powerful computer, now you need to connect it to the outside world, so people can send requests for it to serve responses to. You could do that over dial up on Windows 2000 ... it would be a VERY slow site to browse, but possible in theory.

**chrishirst** · 06:30 AM

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1231102

http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=574743
http://www.tek-tips.com/faqs.cfm?pid=253&fid=3718

Don't even think about trying to connect a server that is even slightly busy using wireless. It will have to be direct to your ADSL router/modem.

I have two dev servers that are public for testing and client demo purposes on a DSL line and have run these for over 5 years. These run IIS & Apache, ASP, .NET, PHP, MySQL & MS SQL.

You don't need a static IP, you can use one of the dynamic DNS services and an update client, I use DynDNS.org and DirectUpdate.

Do NOT run a site that you are going to invite search engines on to. Your DSL connection will overwhelmed on a very regular basis.
Do NOT try to use Windows 2000 Pro, XP Pro or Vista as an OS. These are limited in the number of connections that can be made to the OS.

An average small website (one with no huge images or downloads and "clean" code) requires around 2 - 3 Kbits/s for each concurrent user to maintain a decent response speed for page delivery. So the actual size of the "pipe" does not matter so much, you can run two or three moderately busy sites on a 64Kb ISDN connection. While on DSL a single moderately busy site could be struggling fairly often.
The reason being is that DSL is a "contended" (shared) service. and on a home connection there will be a contention ratio of 50:1, where you are sharing your 288 Kilobits upload with 50 other users (upload speed being the important factor). With ISDN it is a one to one connection so you get 64 Kbits all day every day.

Some ISPs do not actually bar you from running servers in your connection explicitly, though some do. What they do is apply a "Fair Use Policy" to an "unmetered" connection plan, and of course you wouldn't run a public server on a capped ADSL plan.