home server

 This page is intended to provide a brief account of how we are trying to establish the web server hosting this site at home on a budget.

 The hardware is not that critical for a server hosting a single domain and delivering the occasional page to visitors. If the objective is to practice and learn the process of setting up a professional web server, then by all means play with a scsi raid array for the sake of speed, reliability and redundancy. Corporates generally retire their servers before their use by date. You can usually pick up a quite reasonable second hand server on eBay if you do your homework.

 If you are serious then you will register your own domain name. We registered alphaweb through www.ausweb.com.au. Their domain name charges are quite reasonable. They probably count on many of these customers to use their web hosting services to make money.

 An under appreciated aspect of web serving is the need for a reliable DNS. I have used www.zoneedit.com because they are free to light users. They also provide commercial services, hopefully meaning that they’ll be around for a while. We opted to not use Dynamic DNS (DDNS) in order to better emulate a pro server and for performance and reliability. To learn more about DNS visit www.site-helper.com/dns.html.

 Because my ISP didn’t offer static IP to home broadband users, We checked out what else is available. www.exetel.com.au offered a much better deal than the previous ISP. Exetel charged $40.00 / month for 512/128 ADSL with 16GB peak download, static IP with just a $25.00 churn fee.

 The latest is that, try as I might, We cannot get my NB1300 router to forward port 80 to my computer. My PC has a static IP on the LAN and I’ve tweaked or disabled the firewall and NAT to no avail. Therefore you are seeing this page via cloaked port forwarding to my space at the ISP. Thanks to www.zoneedit.com

 Putting the router in “bridge mode” does work however. This connects my computer directly to the internet. This then necessitates enabling a firewall with the appropriate permissions. Allowing other computers on the network to connect to the internet means also fitting a second Network Interface Card (NIC) to my machine for Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) through a separate switch

 Finnaly, I have yielded to the web hosting companies. For an annual fee of AU$60.00 to AU$70 you get 250 to 1000 Mbytes of storage, 2 to 50 MYSQL databases, up to 50 email addresses and of course your precious data and fruits of your labour are located on their servers and backed up by you.

 The value of off-site hosting with you backing up at your premises, I think, is the most important benefit of using hosting companies for you web site and associated data. I must admit though, getting a home server up and running is a worthwhile technical challenge, especially if you want to make huge amounts of data available. One day.