host web site from home computer?

juschillinnow

Hey guys,

I'm getting ready to present some info to a client that wants to host the web site from thier office computer and I want him to hear it (read it) from you.

What are the ups and downs of doing this, and what computer specs will you recommenc?

Does he need a GB line or will a T1 based line to the trick?

What kinda processor would they need to handle the traffic and for Apache to keep up?

You know, any helpful info would be great!!!!

Thanks alot.

tomhath

Too many variables to answer the question. How much traffic do they expect? What kind of IS staff do they have? Why would they want to host it themselves when hosting services are so cheap?

coditoergosum

You don't need much as far as processor and bandwidth to host a low-mid traffic site. I host a few low traffic sites from my cable broadband connection running on an 1.2ghz AMD Athlon/256mb ram. See http://www.gagon.net , http://www.ipro-dev.com , and http://www.nateandkalley.com . Granted these are all very low traffic sites... but two of them have a LOT of php running.

A T1 is going to be just fine for a moderate traffic website... along the lines of 5-10 GB of transfer per month... or about 1 million page views (depending on size of pages, and other variables). A 1ghz processor in a machine with 512mb of ram running apache/php/mysql will serve up a site with this much traffic just fine, as long as that's all it's doing. Obviously more is better, and 1ghz is probably the bare minimum... but it will work.

Like Tomhath said though, we need more info to really say what is needed. Also, unless they have a person who really knows apache, and server admin in general, then they'd be better off going with 3rd party hosting.

juschillinnow

Thanks for your replies.....Traffic will probably be low-mid range at this moment.

The reason they wanted to know about doing it themselves is really for the reason of space on 3rd party web hosting.

They store tons of movies, mpgs, etc.....

And as anybody can tell you, it costs up the ying-yang to have just 3.0 gigs of space with a web hosting company.

Well anyways, thanks for your replies.... I submit the info at 12:00 est time today, so I will be glad to hear anyone elses thoughts before then 🙂