I might be planning on setting up a server at home and use it to host my website and maybe a couple of my friends sites also. I have cable internet access right now. Would this work? Is this a good idea or a bad idea? If someone here knows could they please explain how to do this with my current domains and other stuff like that.

Thanks
Ben

DO NOT I MEAN DO NOT HOST YOURSELF UNLESS YOU ARE CAPABLE OF RUNNING A SERVER BY YOURSELF.

if you must, get a faster connection, at minimum I would say a commertial dsl line or equvelent. All depends on the hits of your sites. Also depends on your server. If your using your computer for other things other than web hosting, then its even more of a bad idea.

If your must.... provide us with more details like your comp specs and the bandwith you expect to eat up each month.

The server would be something around a AMD Athlon XP 2200+ and 512mb of RAM in the system, and the system wouldnt be used for anything but the server except when I host a LAN party or something and would use that as my dedicated server. I hardly get any hits considering that its just my personal site, and use less than 1gb of bandwidth each month. Mostly everything on my site is plain HTML with a forum on there also, and some pictures too, but thats really it.

Cable connections do not have good upload speeds, thus not being suitable for webservers.

Strong recomendation...

SDSL... and get a high bandwidht connection...

Hosting is cheap.. The only real reason to do it at home is to:
A. Control the server to the Nth degree.

B. because you think its fun, want to learn how to or think you can score chicks because of it..

If it is worth it for you to do it.. Might as well do it right...

Make sure you have a good connection....

A few things to keep in mind when hosting at home:

-Uptime. Your cable connection can go down a bit and your power can go out.

-Speed. As stated before your cable upload speed is usually quite limited.

-Email. All the big boys block email send from a personal IP address. Unless your purchasing business class service you cannot send mail to basically anyone.

I would not ever purchase a better connection to host at home. Also I would not purchase a dedicated IP fore home hosting. Take the money spend on either and get a good reseller account. Usually you can get way more than you actually need. You also get backup power and connections so your site should always be online.

If all you want to host is a small family site that doesnt really have more than 1 or 2 connections at the same time you are fine hosting at home. As for what kind of computer to host a small site on, a P1 200Mhz would run it just fine. Dont spend extra money on a server for just a site or two.

Last thing, your cable provider has in their TOS that hosting anything is against the terms of service and they can and will start blocking your ports if you get enough traffic for them to notice (or they already have your ports blocked, you wont know untill you try to host stuff or have a frind ping your ports).

Good luck and let me know if you have any questions or need help with home hosting. I used to host a few small sites at home before I got into hosting.

Bryan

Yeah they are right, but i see what youre saying. You should be fine considering cable modems have a pretty steady dedicated IP. if your site is personal with not many hits you'll be ok, and standard HTML is no problem at all. Use apache, and make sure you run an antivirus and firewall on that machine. I strongly recommend you use something like dyndns or something of that sort, just incase your IP does change do to an outage or something like that. If you have any questions about how to setup apache for window or linux, or php or mysql databases or anything like that just reply and ill help ya out..If you decide to go reseller package, check out www.kreativenetworks.net a great rate on 10-20-30-100 sites reseller account....low low rates...

Chris

Kreative Networks
www.kreativenetworks.net

There is always the easy option...
1) Get DSL
2) Get a mac
3) got to system preferences and turn on "personal web sharing"
and voila you have your very own apache web server :-)

OK well there's a little more to it than that, you probably have to configure the NAT in your DSL modem and if you want MySQL you gotta download and install it (not to difficult). But if it is an option at all i'd say it'd be one of the better options (next to buying a big server installing BSD and spending a couple of years working out how to use it)