Does anyone host their website at home?

[Whitehouse Quail]

I'm thinking of buying myself a server for at home, to be part of a larger online project I'm getting paid to do. (Basically, I want to be able to touch my chunk of the Internet.

)

I just have a few questions for those who are knowledgable?

1. T1 internet: Must have? Or will cable speeds work?
2. Adding space... once a hard drive runs out of space, you pop in another one, but the part that stumps me is how to get it to recognize more? I can't be changing harddrives in the middle of coding... or can I?
3.Centos? Or Ubuntu?
4. Cpanel alternative? I want the file manager feature the most, but the graphical management is soo much nicer than FTP! Is there a free/cheap alternative/ I've tried PHPMyAdmin or whatever, and no file managing thingy mabob.

Thanks so much!!

 

[rebelcowboysnb]

I guess this question is my domain.

I host www.cmfarm.us from home an have for a few years now.

I dont own one "server." I use 3 outdated desktops stacked off to the side an only one keyboard, mouse an monitor plugged in to which ever i am tweaking at the time.

Question 1: for the first few years I was running DSL with a upload speed of 0.3 mbp an that was streaming video. You just have to watch your file sizes to keep load speed in a good range. I have now upgraded to a conection that is 2 mbs up stream. If I was not streaming video I would not have upgraded. You dont even need a static IP, you can run DYNDNS http://www.dyndns.com/services/dns/dyndns/ to forward requests to your changing IP address.

Question 2: If you think space will be an issue I would start with two hard drives. Drive C will hold the OS an the server programing. The second drive would be for your content. If you run out of space you will just copy your content on to a bigger drive an keep going. But its not hard to tell the server that more content is on a third drive.

question 3: My main server is running the standard GUI desktop of Fedora http://fedoraproject.org/ an the server software is Apache.
My reverse proxy server that streams my video is running the standard GUI desktop of Ubuntu an also uses Apache with the squid add on.
My third PC is running IP Cop http://ipcop.org/ which is a router/front gate an the only PC that is open to the internet. From the outside it looks like my server an takes any attacks if they do happen an the servers are untouched.

Question 4: I have never used a host so dont know anything about Cpanel or anything to replace it.

Feel free to play around on www.cmfarm.us an read threw the code. My server usually sees 3K page views on a Saturday an most are watching my live video streams. Load several of the pages an see if the speed they load seems ok to you. Should give you an idea how fast of a connection you might need.

Hope that helps.

 

[Whitehouse Quail]

Quote:
Oh man, does it ever! Thanks!

(I especially appreciated the '.. is my domain'!)

Really at this moment I'm just trying to shift my mindeset from the coding to coding.... and managing the server. Like, now, I can reference /public_html/...whatever directory and not worry about where it's coming from... but once I introduce a server, I'm going to be managing both ends of the spectrum!

Thanks for your help!

PS.I was very impressed that you use HTML for the entire site! I do enjoy my PHP scripts...

 

[rebelcowboysnb]

I actually know almost nothing about codeing. Dont even know what PHP is. Everything I do know about websites I learned by building that site. I use http://kompozer.net/ free WYSIWYG program to do the basics then used Google to find free codes when I needed something special like my (are you still there) clock or my navigation menu.

The center is the only part of each page that I have in each file. I use Server Side Includes to add the top, sides an bottom from other files so I can change the look of the whole website by changing only one or two files.

I think my error page is the my best work though. www.cmfarm.us/what.html

 

[Whitehouse Quail]

Quote:
Ahh okay. That makes sense now.

Open source code snippets really make my day when I find a good one! And that Server Side Includes sounds similar to PHP. I've never used SSI though.

I did go to the error page, now one of my favorite 404 pages!

 

[rebelcowboysnb]

SSI is where you tell the server to read the file before serving it.

In the file I have codes like this

<!--#include virtual="/left.txt" -->

The server sees that an replaces it with the text in the left.txt file.

So if the left side of my website needs changed I just change the left.txt file an its done.

I just added a code that adds random ads from a list of 60 ads. In reality it looks at the time to see which file to load.

Looks like this:
<!--#config timefmt="%S" -->
<!--#set var="rand" value="$DATE_LOCAL" -->
<!--#if expr="$rand = /00/" --><!--#include virtual="/rand_content/110.txt" -->
<!--#elif expr="$rand = /01/" --><!--#include virtual="/rand_content/111.txt" -->
<!--#elif expr="$rand = /02/" --><!--#include virtual="/rand_content/112.txt" -->
<!--#elif expr="$rand = /03/" --><!--#include virtual="/rand_content/113.txt" -->
<!--#elif expr="$rand = /04/" --><!--#include virtual="/rand_content/114.txt" -->
....................
....................
....................

The effect of randomness by using the clock.
Love google.