[thelist] Hosting at Home

[VOLKAN ÖZÇELİK]

These are my personal experiences:

case 1:

We had two servers: "example.com" being hosted at the US for
international and local customers and "example.net" for accepted
clients only to view their projects' progress.

We were hosting example.net on a home PC with W2K Server. We were
using cable (I cannot remember its bandwith but it was just slightly
larger than normal home use 512K may be). We did not have any problem
with it for more than a year.

After, the number of clients we have increased and we purchased a
leased-line eventually.

case 2:

I once hosted my web site on my home pc, when I had more local
visitors than international ones. (currently the situation is the
opposite and I host my web pages outside my home country -- somewhere
around Texas I suppose :) )

My experience is you will need some a good firewall because in less
than a week cyber-junkies who want to have some fun will find you out
and may cause headaches on your server with their DOS attacks.

Secondly, make sure that you open only necessary ports to outside
world. That is if you only need to host web sites open your HTTP 80
port and only your port 80 -- nothing else.

And reboot your PC regularly. Else you may lose parts of it.
Especially graphic adapters and hard drives are vulnerable.
Be aware that you have a home PC none the less. It's not a monster 
with 4 CPU's and an array of SCSI hard drives that is located in an
adequately cooled down system room (a.k.a. the refrigerator).

HTH,
--
Volkan Ozcelik
+>Yep! I'm blogging! : http://www.volkanozcelik.com/volkanozcelik/blog/
+> My projects/studies/trials/errors : http://www.sarmal.com/