Should I host it all at home?

[shovenose]

Now that I've decided to do away with my hosting "company" I have to host Hardware Insights SOMEWHERE! lol.
I have two choices:
1. I have a shared hosting account with HostGator for shovenose.com I can simply add hardwareinsights.com as an addon domain onto the same account without paying more.
Pros: better uptime and support
Cons: takes FOREVER to backup the site, I don't have full control
2. Host Hardwareinsights.com on my home server. This is tricky but I could get it to work using my No-IP.com Enhanced account
Pros: I have full control, and editin g the site would be FFFASSSTT because it would pretty much be a dedicated server and I'm on a fast LAN network lol!
Cons: hosted on residential DSL, less uptime, possibly slower loading speeds.
_____________________________________________
Any thoughts as to which one?

[ratdude747]

Re: Should I host it all at home?

I'd say #1 just because residential DSL sucks as it is... trying to host a decent site off of it is like trying to play any modern game on a 486.

[shovenose]

Re: Should I host it all at home?

my speeds are 6M/768K (down/up)
my upload is a bit slow unfortunately.
If I get faster internet would it be oK?

[Koda]

Re: Should I host it all at home?

Yep that's slow upload but it all depends from how many people are visiting the site at once. If you have more than 15 visitors at any given site I'd say you need at least 6M/6M connection. I'd recommend you getting optical net with speeds above 20M if you are serious about hosting.

[mariushm]

Re: Should I host it all at home?

Uhmmm..... number 1.

Full control is not really required for a website with low number of users - if you make enough money out of ads or out of a separate job, you'll afford to move it to a vps or a dedicated server and further improve it.

Backup slow? Maybe you're not doing it right. Maybe it doesn't really have to fast... There are tools that help you automate and create a backup and save it ON the server and then you simply ftp the whole tar.gz/zip/whatever to your computer - the slowness will then be just your download speed.

Hosting at home is not feasible with DSL. It might work with cable and fiber, depending on the ISP but it won't work with DSL.

1. You have only 768k upload - that's at best 768/8 - 10% overhead = ~ 80 KB/s upload. Each user loading your website for the first time (not having anything cached) will download about 780 KB from you, about 650KB being from your domain.



No user will use your full dsl upload speed due to routing (routing, lots of servers between you and him, you doing some download or serving other people) so assuming you'll have 50K/s to him, it's gonna take 650/50 = ~ 13 seconds just to transfer the file + about 3 seconds to resolve your domain and make the connections and so on.
You can see in the image above it takes 6.3 seconds now to load your site from the hosting you have, and I'm on a 100/6 cable connection.

After the initial caching on the user site, your website will still send about 150K with each page, because some of the files can't be cached due to the ?ver= in the URL, which is added by wordpress.

2. You'll have a lot of problems maintaining the domain - ip updated and it may be even against the TOS of your internet plan to host servers at home.

3. You won't be able to send mail (user registration, change password, send newsletters, blah blah) - residential ips are generally automatically and voluntary added by isps to anti-spam organisations and mail servers reject mail coming from them.

.. and there's more reasons but I guess these are enough.

You might be able to host it from home if you figure out how to serve static content from somewhere else (the js files, the jpg files etc)..
ex.
you could get a cdn and pay 0.10$ per GB and have that serve the js and pictures and then you only serve the 15-20 KB php scripts
you could use Google apps for website and its free cdn (limited to a small requests per day, adequate if you have few visitors)
you could use a service like sendgrid.com for mail which would cost you about 10 cents for 1000 emails sent..

and there's lots of other tricks or things you could do

- but the simplest would be to just go with hostgator or a shared hosting company better than hostgator.

[shovenose]

Re: Should I host it all at home?

Just to update this thread, I would no longer consider hosting at home
My company happily hosts Hardwareinsights.com in a professional real datacenter!

[Topcat]

Re: Should I host it all at home?

^ you said your 'company' was debunked in your original post.....

Get a cable modem, far more reliable for home hosting.

[shovenose]

Re: Should I host it all at home?

^ you said your 'company' was debunked in your original post.....

Get a cable modem, far more reliable for home hosting.

Yeah I know, I don't remember why I said that?
It's not!!
You can even ask c_hegge to prove it.

And yes, I now have Cable Internet with more than 6Mbps upload, but since it's against the TOS and I can't get Static IPs, hosting sites on it is out of the question.

[c_hegge]

Re: Should I host it all at home?

As the owner of Hardware Insights, I vote option 1 for better uptime, performance and support.

It's not!!
You can even ask c_hegge to prove it.

I can bacck him up on this. I have ADSL, and other than the wireless dropouts from my nutgear router, It's been extremely reliable. Now that I have a business modem/router (the SMC Barricade), it's been perfect.

[shovenose]

Re: Should I host it all at home?

As the owner of Hardware Insights, I vote option 1 for better uptime, performance and support.

You know how long ago this was? Look at the date!

[c_hegge]

Re: Should I host it all at home?

Whoops. Brain fart

[shovenose]

Re: Should I host it all at home?

Erm, could somebody please add (OUTDATED THREAD) to the title so that people don't think I'm going to host their sites at home now?