| Is Home Based Hosting Good?

Is Home Based Hosting Good?

Is it feasible to host a website at home and deliver it around the world over a broadband connection? Whilst this is possible there are numerous of issues to overcome which is not something that the average computer user should consider.

You can easily find a budget web hosting provider who will, at reasonable cost, host your site and care for the all background issues (security, maintenance etc.).

Home business web hosting can be viewed as a learning exercise but it will cost more, involve lots of work and provide an inferior service.

If you still wanted to go ahead with this you would need to consider the following:

ISP Contract:- Your ISP (Internet Service Provider) contract may have a clause banning you from using your broadband connection for this purpose. If so you may be able to upgrade your connection but at an increased cost. Remember that the speed of your website will be determined by the speed of your upstream link which will be considerably slower than the “headline” downstream speed.

IP Addresses:- Do you have a dynamic or static IP Address? If you’re on a DSL connection it is likely to be dynamic, so it can change maybe as frequently as any time you connect. Normally you can change this to a static IP address for an additional fee. Your IP address will be linked to your domain name and is used to locate your website so a static address is preferable. However, it is possible to use a dynamic IP address by using the services of a dynamic DNS provider.

Domain Name:- You will need to register and pay for a domain name in just the same way as you would if using a hosting company.

Configuration and setup:- The best way forward might be to host the website on your pc using Microsoft’s IIS (Internet Information Services) web server provided you have the correct version of Windows (current version requires Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2). Running a web server raises some serious security issues and you may feel that it will likely be better to utilize a separate computer as your server. You could use this as an opportunity to use Linux with the Apache server (the most commonly used web server).

The challenge of setting up the software may be the reason for doing all this but afterwards you will also have to consider server updates, problem diagnosis, security auditing, hardware maintenance (or failures) to name some. If anything major goes wrong you will have to fix it yourself, for example, what happens if the server goes down whilst you are away on holiday?

Running Costs:- You should not underestimate the price of running a server 24/7. The electricity bill alone will probably be considerably more than you would pay for a hosting service.

My view:- If your site has a commercial element or needs to be taken seriously you should have it hosted professionally. This will provide a better service to your users and be the cheaper option. Home buy cheap web hosting hosting is feasible but is something you would only do as a hobby.

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