Web Hosting - Roll Your Own vs Hosting Company? 75
Case42 asks: "My former webhost company was recently acquired by a larger company that I find myself increasingly dissatisfied with. This presents me with a dillema and a question for all you slashdotters. Do I find another webhost or bite the bullet and host the site myself? I have a decent DSL connection and my site is low traffic, so i'm not concerned about the bandwitdth too much. I'm a sysadmin by trade so i can handle the technical aspects of setting up and running the site without a problem. Despite the fact that it means yet another system to administer i'm leaning towards hosting the site myself, anyone have any horror stories trying to host their site from home, any excellent webhosts out there?" How much traffic could a typical, residential DSL connection take out there, anyways?
HOWTO Run a Hosting Co (Score:1, Informative)
www.flexserv.co.uk/~manuela/howto/HOWTOHOSTCO.htm [trollaxor.com]
Re:Whoop! Troll Alert! (Score:1)
-JB
Re:Whoop! Troll Alert! (Score:1)
Apologies!
-JB
ProHosting.com (Score:2, Informative)
Re:ProHosting.com (Score:1)
I rolled my own.... (Score:2, Informative)
I rolled my own because I wanted the experience, and because my ISP wanted $80 extra, per month, for a static IP. There was no one in town that I trusted to co-locate with (one was being sued by a school district, and the other I used to have email with and came to despise). I also wanted to try several different mail servers, with different OS's, and rolling my own was the only way.
If you don't mind not having the Gold service contract and some sort of guarantee that your connection will be up 24x7, try it from home. Buy a nice, quiet PC that you don't mind having on all the time, and buy something low-powered since it's going to run constantly. Expect to add $10 to your monthly power bill, minimum.
It's not that bad. Friends and other people don't comment about the slowness of my connection, and I'm not a chronic/compulsive downloader, so the connection's relatively traffic free. About twice per month I'll download over 50MB at one sitting.
And finally, I'm posting anonymously so that I don't get
Specifics (Score:1)
Need some more details to really answer your query.
I've had some success with myhosting.com [myhosting.com] which offers a simple $9.95/month package with unlimited bandwidth and 50 MB of storage. But, it's a windows-based platform and I'm looking for a Linux web hosting solution onto which I can move my site. I've done some googling, but can't tell much about the quality of the providers I've found. Besides, I've got this nagging thought that I'd pick some company, get the site set up, and have them go bamkrupt on me. :(
Can anyone recommend an impartial web site that rates and/or compares the various web hosting providers?
Re:Specifics (Score:1)
http://www.imagelinkusa.net/
Re:Specifics (Score:2)
Figure out my email above for more.
I really don't check other prices, this is simply what I want to host a domain. So no bitchin if it's to high or not the right amount of space or whatever.
Re:Specifics (Score:2)
Seriously, I have been kicking around the idea of getting a unit at rackspace or something and offering webhosting services. Then I see some of the posts here for basic hosting starting at $3/month with 2.5GB traffic!. Jeebus, how do you compete with that?
Kinda takes the wind outta my sails.
Incidentally, I host from home. It's a streaming audio service, so I will eventually need a faster pipe. But if this guy is a sysadmin, why is he even posting on
Re:Specifics (Score:1)
gh1 [gh1.com] offers a low cost linux option.. They run off RedHat, using Apache. Their cheapest route is $10 a month, or $110 a year. Its worth a look. I've been hunting myself, as I am now in the market as well for a new host.
fishThe biggest concern should be... (Score:1)
I love my server, and no-one visits it, but thats ok (and
My first instinct is that it's cheaper overall to go with a cheap web hosting place.
I do my own hosting (Score:2)
So all in all if it's not a heavy bandwidth site then do it on your own. If it starts to get heavy you could always get a fractional t1 or ship it off to a hosting company. Until then, do your own stuff because at the end of the day when something needs to be done you're gonna end up doing it yourself or walking someone else through it anyway.
I do my own hosting as well (Score:1)
I use it for experimenting. I have Mysql, Postgresql, Tomcat, DB2, Jrun. WebSphere, PHP, Python (ZOPE),and Citrix all running. Thats to improve my skills and to just play around. I have port forwarding all over the place, so one page might be on a separate server all together! Half the links aren't publically acessible because I doubt anyone would care that I just set up a new Python Based message board or that I just wrote a DB2 query in JSP using WebSphere on Linux. I do have stuff that no one cares about, but it's htere anyway! It's part of my lab. I get to play and get to show the world if they care! I can set people up with demo citrix accounts if they would like to test it out. (What I think is cool is I have Win2k Advanced server running on a laptop with Citrix Metaframe XP). Even though it took me 3 times as long to set that piece of shit up in comparison to a Linux box (multipe reboots just to install updates), I only have to reboot it 3 times a week
Re:I do my own hosting as well (Score:1)
And it's sic, not sick.
Look at it this way... (Score:2)
The only word of advice that you need at this point is, "Don't get slashdotted," and everything will be hunky-dory.
:Peter
DSL + Slashdotted = just fine, actually (Score:2)
It's also worth mentioning that reason I switched to Sourceforge was that his DSL provider went under. For a little project like Eidola, that was OK. But if you need uptime, pay somebody to host.
Depends on content (Score:1)
Just because it is on
Re:Depends on content (Score:2)
I'm sure we didn't see anything like Yahoo-scale traffic, but we still saw several tens of thousands of hits in the first few hours -- certainly more than your average home-hosted site is going to see on an average day. (His got more traffic in 24 hours than it had previously in its entire lifetime of several years.)
Or you could... (Score:2)
Get your own server and run your 'hosting company' for 10-20 people. Make some small cash on the side hosting personal sites (just enough to cover the expenses maybe). Nobody can get too mad about no customer service or less than stellar uptime because they're paying like $5 or less a month, plus they're mostly your buddies.
With the little extra cash you could probably afford a commercial DSL with the money you clear.
My host is doing this, and it's the best of both worlds. He gets my $6/month and I get a shell account and enough space and bandwidth to amuse myself. Except for some cgi startup woes (my bad) I've had no problems and he's been great. In fact, he's a heckuva lot more helpful than customer service from my ISP.
Re:Or you could... (Score:2)
First and formost, if you feel that you have the skills to host your own system, and your willing to put in the time... I'd say go for it.
I run a hosting company, though rather small. The truth is that competition is pretty rough out there. And you can find hosting fees that are about half of what it costs me to provide the service to my customers... Heck, free sites abound. The $20 bucks that you spend on hosting is neglegent.
So let's discount price as being relavant, at least the $20 hosting fee.
Which is why I rebuff the parent post here. 10-20 users at $5 -$10 a month.
First commercial grade connection, needs at a minimum a t1 or partial if you want service. Local loop $400/month internet connection fees at least $200/month. So you would spend $600/Month just to get an income of 50-200 dollars, doesn't add up.
And remember you have to run customer service along with that... Talking 10 minutes a month to each user 1 hours - 4 hours a month.... Hmmm, cheap sysop $20/hour there goes another hundred dollars.... No profit at all.
If you want to set up the hosting, it's not a big deal... Plenty of help out there as well. But if you want to get into the web server business you need to count on sinking major bucks into something that won't payout for years, if ever...
So, let's discount hosting for someone else it's not worth the effort.
Which leaves us with the question still host yourself or host elsewhere.
Many the factors to consider are:
Bandwidth
Control
Price (upscale)
Reliability
Most of the companies out there are pretty resonably price for webhosting. Bandwidth generally runs 3G month, sufficient for most applications and have good uptimes... Control is a different issue since you are a user on their systems and not root.
Running a T1 or partial to your house and hosting your own servers. Bandwidth around 500G a month, uptimes depends on your UPS system and whether the provider can support you. Here in Georgia, Bellsouth has a lot of reliability issues, so expect a 2 hour outage once a year... Paying for a commercial grade connection though does have it's advantages.... When you have a problem you are bumped to the top of the list for repair... Price is a little inflated though typical partial T1 costs around 500-700/month with fulls going for 700-1400 depending on provider. Control ahhh, full control is so nice... no driving to fix the problem no waiting on customer support.
DSL is a little bit less expensive than t1, except that the 2hour repair time is somewhere between 2days and 2 weeks. Add to the fact that the tech just gets the DSL running and probably won't switch you to clean wires in order to minimizing the chance it might happen again... Cheaper yes 50-120 dollars for home use 200-300 for business.
Server CO-LO. Server colo is a nice option, usually around $150/month for hosting and full control of the machine. $150 usually gets you 10-20GB a month and that's more than sufficient for most purposes. Uptime is great, clean power feeds generally and if the network goes down, the hosting company has other problems to deal with besides your problem... It will or better be fixed quickly. You do lose a little control though, no reaching over and hitting the power switch... I suggest Linux or some type of UNIX but I doubt you wanted to run windows.
The last option is renting a cabinet and sublet your space to others with whatever you have left over. This normally runs $1500/month and you usually have to pay around $4/GB a month. Not a bad option, but you then get into the business of supporting other people and it's really a money loss at this point. Get some experience running a co-lo box and making sure you are comfortable before going this route...
Oh, one other option, buy ATT I understand they are available, probably overkill though... Grin
If you need any help or advice drop me a line and I'll do what I can to help out.
Lando
..none... (Score:1)
You'd be better off if you got a business DSL. That was you can claim it as a business expense or set it up as a none profit on your taxes and take advantage of that aspect. (If you are in the US).
Re:..none... (Score:2)
I host several pretty major (but low traffic - 200-500MB/mo total) sites on my 640/128 DSL line and have not experienced problems at all.
You are correct, though, about setting up a business (legally) and getting a tax break, etc. Bud DSL is often SDSL, so your uplink doesn't suffer.
Re: non-profit (Score:2)
IANATA (I am not a tax attorney), but this line should probably be treated the same as any home office or business use of the personal car. For the home office you have to measure square footage (and prove exclusive use as an office), for the car you have to maintain mileage logs.
So you should track the network traffic and characterize it as either personal or business....
Except this isn't quite right. You can turn off a dialup account, but you can't turn off a DSL connection where people can hit your site at any time. There needs to be some way of accounting for availability.
Because of these secondary factors, you could probably get away with deducting the difference between your business DSL account and a cheap local dialup account. Then if you're challenged, you can at least demonstrate a reasonable effort to account for personal use of the business resource. But if you try to claim the entire expense, you may have the entire deduction denied and have penalities assessed.
Easy as pie (and almost as good) (Score:2)
Unless you've got a site like Slashdot, I strongly recommend hosting off your own DSL line. It's extremely cheap (even free if you were already paying for the line anyway), and it's so much less troublesome than dealing with a hosting company.
Well... (Score:1)
And the bandwidth usage depends on the information on the server (or lack thereoff), if you cut off web-bots/spiders, you are more sure of the low bandwith usage.
The best thing with doing it yourself, besides the satifaction, is you can have the server running exactly how you want it
Did it myslef... (Score:3, Interesting)
This of course was in the good old days when Rogers Cable was not yet Rogers@home, and they were giving out static IPs. (I live in Toronto, Canada). Right now they have dynamic IPs, and they actually drop your connection on purpose, just to change your IP. Kiling dhcpcd and then restarting it solves the problem, but it's annoying nonetheless. This would definitely be a problem with DSL too.
There are some work-arounds. One is to get a domain name with dyndns.org (e.g croco.dyndns.org), which can be updated through scripts any time the IP changes. Then set your real domain name to resolve to croco.dyndns.org I haven't tried it, but it might work. Of course, it adds one more layer of latency on an already slow connection. Not to mention another failure point (what happens if dyndns craps out on you?)
Another way that I can think of is everytime the IP changes to log into your registrar and change the IP the domain resolves to. But this is tedious, unless they also support changes through scripts. I am yet to find a registrar that does.
But those are not the biggest problems (small bandwidth and dynamic IPs). The show stopper for me was the reliability of the connection. You might not notice the out times during the night or when you're at work, or simply away from your computer. But believe me, they happen. And someone trying to visit your web site will too. Worst of all is that in my case, Rogers doesn't even bother announcing the outage. The worst example? I was in the middle of my university course selection when the connection crapped out on me, and I lost all the changes I made. Needless to say, I was fuming! The fact that my web site wasn't available either was a minor issue by comparison.
So I say find yourself another decent web host, if you care about the reliability and availability of your site. There are plenty out there, good and cheap. But if you don't care if your web site might die on you without any notice, then by all means, host it yourself. It's an enjoyable experience, and you'll learn something.
Re:Did it myslef... (Score:2)
Are you sure this isn't dhcpcd crapping out. I used pump, changed to dhcpcd because it was crapping out every two days and then to dhcp-client for the same reason. It's been fine ever since. Try it.
Re:Did it myslef... (Score:2)
Rogers has been doing some stupid stuff with their dhcp servers. I had been using dhcpclient (2.2.x) and for a while was restarting the client every hour. Now I am on DSL. The last straw for me was the email forwarding problem. Other rogers's users could not send mail to my email address which forwarded back to my rogers account.
TLD's On dynamic ips (Score:1)
use dyndns like normal, however when you create the dns record for yor tld, in stead of creating an a record to an ip, use a cname to the dyndns address.
www.ziobrowski.net works like this
I made the switch... (Score:1)
If, however, you do decide to go with a hosting service, try he.net or pair.net. They both are friendly to the "Slashdot type of admin" and their service is good and priced fairly.
I do it too... (Score:1)
Other than that, I have no problems. It is great because you can do everything you want on your own box.
check out phpwebhosting.com (Score:1)
They have a pretty snazzy list of features including:
SSI,
PHP4,
Perl,
Python,
cgi-bin,
password protected directories,
crontab,
ssh access (which is a must if you ask me)
There price seems resonable and they don't really have a size limit. They boast burstable bandwidth (whatever that means). Check them out.
Self-Managed 1U colo (Chicago) (Score:3, Informative)
While we offer DSL (and allow running servers on DSL, with static IPs), many members choose to colocate 1U or 2U servers to run their own web site(s).
This approach eliminates the reliability, latency and bandwidth issues that come from locating the server in your home, at the tail end of a DSL circuit. You get the same high-availability power, cooling, and connectivity as the managed services customers in the next room, at a fraction of the cost.
The biggest difference is that unlike hosting at home via DSL, turning up the bandwidth from 384K to X megabits is simply a matter of a cutting a larger check to the association, and a simple configuration change at the gateway router.
Each member gets a subnet (usually a /29) on a VLAN dedicated to their machine(s), with hard and soft bandwidth limits courtesy of Cisco's Rate Limit IOS Commands [cisco.com]. This ensures that no one user can eclipse another, nor steal/spoof their IP addresses.
There are two major drawbacks -- This approach isn't cheap [ispfh.org], and hardware upgrades and related repairs take some coordination for physical access to the shared rack space.
We used to host our own... (Score:3, Informative)
The only downside is that you won't get the uptime of a colo center. I used SpeakEasy SDSL and while reliable, they weren't 100%. You just have to ask how important this site is and whether you can be down a day every month or two. Also, do you want other poeple using YOUR bandwidth?
Get a quiet system to run this on, as the whirring of a server will get old.
Hosting with DSL may *SEEM* like a good idea (Score:2, Insightful)
One tuesday morning the DSL just stopped working. Help desk phone lines were ringing busy, clients were mad, and we were pretty much helpless. When we finally did get through to someone at the help desk (the next morning) the person we talked to said it was planned network maintence. Network maintence doesn't happen tuesday afternoons. We were mighty pissed, espescially when this started happenning more and more often.
Long story short though, your ISP isn't really accountable like a hosting provider when it comes to availability. They don't care you were running a server off that DSL connection. Any home broadband is just too unreliable in my opinion.
If you wanted my advice, go find a small hosting provider that isn't mainly concerned with how many people they can fit on a stock RedHat machine.
In my opinion Vex [vex.net] is a group like that, or (shameless plug), UpNIX [upnix.com]
I do both- Host at home and pro hosting (Score:1)
As for how much traffic a DSL line can take, I don't know since I only get about a dozen visitors a day. If anyone wants to know, go a head and "/." The-Andersons.com [the-andersons.com] and TheInfoBox.com [theinfobox.com]. After I restore my site to normal, I will let you know how bad it was!
I'm still shopping around myself, (Score:1)
used to do it (Score:5, Informative)
mod_gzip: use it. It will speed things up a lot
mail: if you are prone to outages, reboots or loss of power, you probably don't want to send your mail to your local box. Get a cheap $5 account and send all mail there. My connection went down when I was away on vaca and I lost lots of mail.
quiet: I kept my PC in my bedroom. My PC was loud. At times it would keep me awake or I would sleep on the couch. Get a quiet PC if possible
backup: Don't forget to backup. shit happens.
I used to host at home over SDLS, than northpoint went out of business. That sucked.
My replacement was an ADSL connection with a slower uplink and the tendency to drop the connection every few days. The only way to get the connection back is a hard reset of the DSL gateway/router. Damn!
I have since switched back to a 3rd party host.
Re:used to do it (Score:1)
Re:used to do it (Score:2)
Bad call.
Internet mail is VERY tolerant of crappy connections. If you have a decent ISP they'll provide a backup MX for you. If not, find a couple of buddies with equally crappy connections (preferably with diferent providers) and "trade" MX records with them.
A single POP box is enough for most people, but someone who wants to run his own webserver will likely find enough value in running mailing lists, setting up multiple boxes for SPAM control, etc. to make the little bit of extra configuration worth while.
-Peter
Bandwidth? (Score:1)
Not enough to survive the slashdot effect, that's for sure...
Digital Space (Score:1)
problems created problems solved (Score:1)
I wouldn't recommend it for anything important. I think you'll run into more problems then you'll solve.
Reliability is what you buy with a hosting service (Score:2)
Is your DSL service static IP, Always?
Can you afford the downtime of a residential-grade circuit?
Can you afford the downtime of power failures, or the cost of a UPS?
Maintain your own hardware?
Maintain your own backup hardware and schedule?
Don't get me wrong, I've hosted a web site from a home over 56K frame relay and later ADSL for years, without a problem.
I prefer to host it myself because it gives me the control over my system that I prefer. I also make no money from the site, so there is no real risk to me if it goes down for a while for whatever reason.
Five-Nines guranteed reliability is not cheap. If that is important to you, keep the hosting service. However, unless you earn your living with that web site, I cannot imagine it is worth the cost.
Bob-
Excellent Webhosting Company (Score:2)
I'll give you the ONLY piece of advice you'll need (Score:1)
Don't Host Off DSL/Cable (Score:2)
Co-location is cheap and rock solid. I have hosted with three different companies in the last seven years and have been happy with all of them.
DSL and Cable -- even with the best provider -- aren't the same thing as living in a data center. You house doesn't have a couple of T3s. You house might have a UPS and air conditioning but I doubt it has a diesel generator and a fire supression system (other than your garden hose).
Besides that, for the cost of a DSL line with a static IP address (you wouldn't really think of trying this with a dynamic IP, would you?), you could get co-location on a fat pipe.
Right now, I'm co-locating 1U with Vortech Hosting [vortechhosting.com] out of Orlando. It's less than half a mile from where I work. They charge no setup fee and just $50 a month [vortechhosting.com] and that includes 10 gig of transfer on a pair of T3s. I can have as many IP addresses as I'd like so long as 80% are in use.
Yes, it is technically possible to host on the end of a residential cable or DSL line but if your time and sanity mean anything to you, don't do it. Find a nice co-location company and hire them.
InitZero
Get a Frame (Score:1)
Routers can be either leased, purchased on the cheap from Ebay, or built yourself (Linux Router Project, etc).
Definitely give it a thought, I was surprised to see the local CLECs selling a full T1 for ~$700/month.
I would colocate (Score:2)
For a real website, first and foremost, do you have a static IP? If not, forget it. You'll spend the whole time either
a. worrying about what happens if they change your IP address or b. chasing after that jumping IP address which will envolve at least 12 hours of downtime to get the registry to update.
However, for all the college kids out there who don't have a lot of money, I gladly help them set up hosting on their DSL connection. Quite a few of our customers do it, but honestly, with our colo prices, I don't understand why. :-)
Alternative - co-lo server (Score:2)
My site [eruvia.org] (a very modest affair mainly there for permanent email) is run off a co-lo box. We run sixteen other sites, and the costs are way lower than for a hosting company. Plus you get your own box to play around with as you choose.
In my case, the break-even point was 8 sites. After that, we're saving money by running off a co-lo, not spending it.
Cheers,
Ian
34sp.com (Score:2)
Re:34sp.com (Score:1)
If you are a Unix geek do it yourself.... (Score:1)
OpenBSD [openbsd.org] makes a great firewall. Drop three NIC's in it and you are ready to rock. The really cool part is you can charge a nominal fee for hosting and either pay for your DSL or bump it up to a bigger pipe.
Virtual Hosting [apache.org] with Apache is brain dead easy. With postfix [postfix.org] and OpenBSD and the ports tree, Authenticated SMTP is really easy too.
A friend of mine has a howto [dhassler.com] on the authenticated part.
Web hosting (Score:1)
Look at the real cost... (Score:1)
My $0.02 (Canadian) (Score:2)
That said, my situation is a bit different. I'm not hosting my site at home; I'm hosting it at work. I've got a li'l ol' P200 hooked into my work's connection (small ISP). It's a small site, so bandwidth isn't a problem. (I keep trying to get slashdotted, but nobody cares. :-) And it's a small company, with a big emphasis on learning how to do things yourself. Seems a perfect tradeoff to me: they trade a small amt. of bandwidth and the space under my desk
for some free training for a wannabe-sysadmin. I mean, I've worked w/Linux/Apache/Perl/DNS on and off at home, but it's entirely another thing to be using it for something, you know? I also host a few sites for friends on the box -- again, ones that I don't expect to use too much bandwidth -- but I don't charge them. It doesn't cost me anything, it's free, and my work is also a hosting company.
Anyhow, my point is that I think it's fun to run your own machine, and depending on office politics there may well be a place you could stick a box in the corner. Just a thought.
Web Hosting vs. DSL vs. colocation (Score:1)
I've bounced back and forth between hosting with an ISP and using a colocated server.
Until recently, neither my home nor office could get a DSL connection faster than 128K so I didn't consider that an option; recently I did consider an SDSL connection at 384K (both ways) but the price was only $35 per month less than colocation.
Colocation has the advantage of having reduntant backbone connections AND backup power in the event of an outage.
As noted, the server itself does cost money: I managed to snag a nice 1U Compaq DL360 server at the WebVan auction for $1,830 (including tax).
I'm paying $200 per month for colocation, which includes a 10mbps connection (I pay a surcharge if my server uses more than 128K bandwidth more than 5% of the time, currently my 95% usage is only 50K so this isn't an issue).
If you have a 128K-uplink DSL connection, consider how slow your site may look when someone else with a DSL or cable modem connection is accessing it, especially if you have large image files or bloated HTML (common if you don't hand-code).
The real question is, how important is it that the server be up 24/7? I've heard lots of horror stories about DSL connections being inexplicably cut, and it takes 24-48 hours for the Phone Company to fix.
Don't forget Murphy's Law: even if you generally don't care about outages that make your server unavailable 1% of the time, what if the outage occurs just as the search engine is looking for your site? No response, removed from index, bam. Or if the outage occurs when that key client or potential employer is looking for your site?
Of course, one downside of colocation is that your server is somewhere else. In my case, my server is colocated at Hurricane Electric in Fremont, about 15 miles from my house (that's just 20 minutes away at 11pm, but during commute hours it's a 60-90 minute drive). And even colocation has its glitches: someone working on another client's equipment jostled my server's power cord loose (this is actually a frighteningly common complaint, if you don't have your own locked cabinet). I didn't notice the problem until I got an outage notice from a service I hired (about 3 hours after the plug was pulled), then I had to call and have someone walk out to the cabinet, check the server, push the plug back in, and hit the power button.
Also, if you run your own server (where-ever), you'll need to take responsibility for security issues. My server was attacked less than 15 minutes after it was plugged in, and every day my server is probed hundreds of times by script-kiddies.
-- Mark Welch, Internet Performance Marketing Consultant
-- http://www.MarkWelch.com/consult.htm
doh! missed it (Score:1)
anyway if anyone is still interested the specifics of my setup are this: i have a 384 SDSL connection (fastest i can get to my house) with static IPs and servers are explicitly permitted in my contract. the site would definitely be on *nix, either linux or freebsd, windows is strictly for games. the reliability issue isn't that big for me, i think i look at my site more than anyone else. i'm still leaning towards hosting myself unless i find a really good deal.
My experience (Score:2)
I used to have a similar setup at home. I just got tired of having to scramble everytime a remote root exploit in Bind was published. Otherwise I ran apache & qmail, so bind was about the only daemon that gave me trouble. I mean, after dealing with those issues at work every day (I do R&D in computer security, not system administration, at least not these days), I don't want to have to deal with them at home too. So I moved my http and dns servers over to he.net [he.net], which only costs $10/mo for the Basic Virtual Host (which handles my small vanity site just fine). They've been really cool to work with - one of my friend's hosts two sites with them, both of which are much larger than mine, and he's been really impressed with them.
Hope this helps!
-"Zow"
Business or pleasure? (Score:2)
If its for fun you could go a few ways. Use any static space you get from your ISP(and or various free sites) for pics and stuff that don't change (main pages, etc.) Use your home server for dynamic content/databases etc.
You can run a web site behind a dynamic IP that way. I set one up that had my cisco dsl modem send syslog messages to my linux box. The linux box would have a daemon I wrote on it that parsed the syslog for those cicso messages. The syslog deamon would then look for IP changed messages and run a job that would alter any IP references on my web pages to point to the new address and re-load them to the static site. When you hit my static web site it would either just load the page, or auto-redirect to the real page on my server.
Just my 2 cents worth.