Your own webserver

Pantcho!! · Post by **Pantcho!!** » Mon Feb 13, 2006 10:55 am

Hello,

I am about to soon open a Web Server from my home.
i Bought a new pc which is gonna be the server.
prob' asking why i just dont go hosting... well thats because
i am gonna run a project that consist that it will be from my pc.

My question is how meny of you run a server from home?
how much you can handle from your experience, what is the bandwith you use? how much your ISP takes for that.

and some tips and security tips will be nice

thanks

netmaestro · Post by **netmaestro** » Mon Feb 13, 2006 11:09 am

Cable, equivalent to 37 euro/month, d/l speed 400k/sec, u/l 60k/sec, total 60gig/mo max. I use a Linksys router and enable the firewall on it.

Post by **Polo** » Mon Feb 13, 2006 6:23 pm

netmaestro wrote:Cable, equivalent to 37 euro/month, d/l speed 400k/sec, u/l 60k/sec, total 60gig/mo max. I use a Linksys router and enable the firewall on it.

I get 800k/s (some people go up to 2400k/s for the same price) 65k/s without bandwith limit for 30euros/month !
Vive la France !!!

jcoleuk · Post by **jcoleuk** » Tue Feb 14, 2006 7:34 pm

The biggest thing for you will be the upload speed of your connection, most people just cannot afford a fast enough connection to justify running a server from home.

How much traffic do you plan on having? You couldn't host anything as much as a forum, or host large files, because at that speed people wouldn't wait around for things to download.

Shannara · Post by **Shannara** » Tue Feb 14, 2006 8:12 pm

Well, server software should be run on a server OS and server hardware

Since you already covered the server hardware part, we can assume you are running Windows 2000 Server or Windows 2003 for the OS, therefore ...

The actual connection limit in windows 2000 server and windows 2003 is artificially limited by Winsock2 at 65,535 connections. Of course your upstream pipe size and cpu speed makes a huge difference in how fast you can respond to such requests.

Ive tried it with the local provider (fast as I can get), and it still lags from here to everywhere else. I ended up spending $5 a month for the exact same setup I have at home, but with a pure 10mbps connection which is roughly 1.2TB a month or so.

However, you did mention your running it locally so ....

Not only do you have to take in your monthly wear and tear on the computer hardware, but also divide the OS licensing cost, the amount of electricity your server hardware consumes a month, etc, and so on. Which should add up to quite a bit more then $5/month.

aszid · Post by **aszid** » Fri Feb 17, 2006 9:58 pm

I have a server that i run from home, mainly just for developing web apps, and testing. It's not really a dedicated server though, it's setup is something like this:

Shuttle system (via KT266 chipset, i believe)
athlonxp 2000+
512 mb DDR-233
80gb HD

it's not really a beefy machine by any means, but you don't really need all that much for a basic webserver. I'm currently running a full set of server software on it (full set for my uses at least) that includes:

WinXP Pro
Apache 2.something
PHP 5
Mysql 4
CeasarFTP

I considered linux, but ended up going with windows because i use this machine as a media center as well, to watch DVD's and video on my TV.

I haven't actually stress tested my server setup, and i don't think i have enough bandwidth to even give it a good run (DSL 3mb/768), When i do pull files from it or anything else, my download speed caps off at around 55k/s.

For me personally, i just did it because it made it really easy to do PHP development, when i can just access a share to edit my .php files, and save them instantly to the server that i can test them from.

I actually have a domain, and hosting from a normal company, that i don't really use, but i did set up a subdomain to point to my server at home.

if you're really bored and want to see a half-done homepage that i haven't been working on you can take a look at how it runs at http://mini.aszid.com

One other thing you should be aware of... Even without a subdomain, and no links or redirects to my ip address from the web, people/scripts/bots attempt to hack my server decently often. I've kept the security updated and i run regular checks, and look through the logs decently often as well, just to be sure. But you will have to keep in mind that people are going to be trying to mess up your server.

dagcrack · Post by **dagcrack** » Sat Feb 18, 2006 12:24 am

Talking about server administration and security but not knowing about bandwidth is a bad thing..

768kbps should give you about 96kB/s of downstream client-side.
However you might have a cap per-client and not even know about it.
But then if you were downloading from a 512kbps connection, doh.

I'd say that you'll be attacked by a spider and not by someone willing to take out data from your server... Unless you've gave them a reason for said action. In that case you should have a simple reaction: block their route.

Talking about spiders, how lame can people be this days? They are concerned about spiders stealing their email addresses, so what do they do? put an image with their email address.. Cool, jerk, you still got your email on the mailto: - You are avoiding nothing then!. They dont realize thats where a spider looks at... So thats why the purpose is to put an image with out any link. Even though you could still manage to catch the address from the image with some simple algorithms, however who the hell you think you are anyway?

- No one cares about your email address that much exept for your own self!.

Running a bunch of services is something that even my dog can do.. Administrate them correctly in an efficient and professional way, is something you'll only be able to achive after many years of experience on server administration.

Log analyzing is a good routine anyway. You dont only get to know about possible attacks attempts, you'll also check out referers (important, you want to know whos linking to you for example) and even download counts for the heck of it, in fact you can analyze bandwidth used per directory, or anything you'd like to analyze.. Logs are very important. Something that really annoys me is how many of this little kiddie hosting "companies" (well they just bought a reseller plan, they dont own any servers...) never provide said logs to their customers, in fact many of this services are as unsecure as going to a gay parade on shorts.

So yes, thats it. Wear a lock, a good brand one.
(meaning in this case: Keep an eye on your server if you're letting it out*).

* Inet access.

Now excuse me but I've got to go, see if it rains.

aszid · Post by **aszid** » Sat Feb 18, 2006 1:00 am

hehe, well i exagerated slightly with my DSL plan... it's actully 384-768 upstream, that's how they screw people around these parts, by giving you a range it makes it sound alot faster than it's really going to be.

But yeah, lots of spiders end up hitting my box, but there's also a ton of worms and/or people that try to cause issues, it's not too hard to tell a buffer-overflow attempt in the logs, someone tries one on my box probably every 2-3 days, almost never from the same IP twice.

I threw my box together for more of a hobby thing than anything else, and i wouldn't say that i really do much "administrating" on it, i hardly ever touch the thing after all. At work, we use nothing but linux, and i'm not a systems administrator anyhow. But I'm competent enough to keep my home boxes up and running just fine, as well as thwarting the attempts people have made on my security, thus far at least.

The secret I've discovered about runnin a server, is that it's not as hard as system administrators try to make it sound, I've learned that from my work in the past few years.

Anyhow, i never claimed to be an expert on the subject, i just thought i would pass on my experiences as a *normal user* as far as running a server goes.

I do have to say, i'd like to see a dog that's capable of getting apache/php/mysql all up and running and getting along properly. I never claimed it was hard, but generally like.. having fingers helps.

ricardo · Post by **ricardo** » Sat Feb 18, 2006 1:49 am

dagcrack wrote: however who the hell you think you are anyway? - No one cares about your email address that much exept for your own self!.

?????

Thats not true at all!!

Put your e mail in a medium traffic webpage and you will get tons (but really tons) of spam almost instantly.

Post by **Dare2** » Sat Feb 18, 2006 1:58 am

Using javascript to obsfucate the email address embedded in the html (the mailto: bit) can overcome most email crawlers/trawlers (but i hear some are aware of the more common downloadable obsfucators and their approaches).

Perhaps best is a post to script which just dumps the message in a database and, periodically, you view the db, either going to a hidden url or with a (PureBasic of course) client that is scheduled to run every so often.

* wags tail *