Hosting a website at home?

Kinda had an idea for a commercial website (no it's not porn! ) and was wondering what the accumulated GRM wisdom is on how to go about doing that. There wouldn't be any credit cards or etc involved, at least not at first. I had in mind more of an information site which, when traffic counts got up, revenue would come from selling advertising. Not planning a forum, at least not unless at some point a need arose. But I'd like to have the option, if possible.

It seems Apache is the go to for small scale stuff but being free there's probably not a lot of support. Of course I'd want to isolate it from my other computers in case hackers got into it.

Ideas?

I wanted to know how to do a web site, so I did one. Got a domain from 1&1 and built it in Wordpress. Wordpress can do, actually, quite a lot.

It ain't much of a web site, but I did get some understanding of the whole thing.

http://cushingfamilyracing.com/

If you can, use Wordpress with cheap hosting. (even GoDaddy is reasonable on a small scale.) Your costs will be very low to operate this way. (Like...$100 a year ish.)

Slap in your Google AdSense code (also a free program) and watch the nickels pour in.

The problem is the scale. The point at which hosting becomes expensive comes well before the part where advertising becomes lucrative. At least in my experience...

Whatcha got cooking? (PM me if it's a great secret.)

As fast_eddie hints at (EDIT: and Tom spells out...), I would just have it hosted elsewhere. It's cheap and removes a lot of headaches. I never want to be a sysadmin. Most hosting places also have things like Wordpress set up so you don't have to do any installation...

On top of the admin stuff, your home Internet connection is probably pretty slow upstream compared to downstream, but your upstream is your users' downstream if you host at home...

I'm a developer, not an admin, and I'm thinking that I may be telling you stuff you already know, and am doing one of my own Internet pet peeves by answering "how do I do A?" with "Do B instead"...

A little background about which parts of web development and hosting you already have a handle on would help.

FWIW, where "support" means "the ability to google for how stuff works" (which seems to be 90%+ of getting things done), the open source projects like Apache tend to have a lot of users who write down what they know, and thus Apache, PHP, etc are very well documented. But I think this may be an unnecessary digression...

@ Curmudgeon-

Do you mean commercial as in business to business or simply that you'd like it to make some money? Your content will kinda determine which methods are likely to suit your needs.

I'd like it to make some money but not be business to business. I'm figuring to draw people in with the site (lots of search words to get near the top in teh Googles), then let Google or ?? post ads based on the zip code of the person who's checking out the site. Then I get paid $1,000,000.00 per click. You have PM, Tom.

Another thought would be to check your ISPs terms of service/features. They often disallow hosting websites from the home on consumer internet packages. Plus, they don't do things such as static IPs, guaranteed uptime, etc.

Going hosted is usually much easier and you have someone to blame when your site goes down unexpectedly.

Your other big thing will be upload speed. Your viewers' download speed might be 50mb, but your upload speed getting the content to them will probably only be about 1mb.

+1 on paying to host somewhere. We host 2 servers for our customers to access over the web (which is functionally the same as hosting a website, for the most part.) One is on our hardware here at the shop and the other is hosted by a company. I have consistant headaches with the one I maintain here, although this could because I BARELY understand what I'm doing with it (shhhhh....) If you're asking about hosting, then you probably are in about the same boat when it comes to server hardware as I am. Plus investing in the server, firewall, and protection hardware is pricey, IF your ISP will allow you to host. Then there's the upload rate issue...

Many places offer scalable hosting models with charges based on traffic. Assuming you can capitolize on the traffic, it can allow your fees to pace with your income.

If there's a chance that traffic will suddenly explode without your revenue doing the same, be careful. Flat rate plans are out there (that's what we do) but they start to get expensive. We're spending a couple hundred dollars per month.

+1 to the growing chorus of "have someone else host the website". It is very cheap to have GoDaddy host your website, and you can specify the type of server you want to run on. If you get someone like Rackspace or Amazon to do it, you can get them to instantly provision more server and bandwidth to your site on an as-needed basis (like if your site happened to hit Gawker or Slashdot).

Even before the scaling consideration - between the available enterprise hardware, and other people making sure said hardware stays running while you sleep/do other productive things, I see no reason to host the site yourself.

Interesting... didn't think about the as-needed bandwidth thing. I'd hate to get it up and running, then find a very expensive bottleneck. Y'all keep teaching this old redneck about Web hosting!

I run my website through a VPS. We'd outgrown shared hosting a long time ago and it was dragging the whole thing down. Didn't help that HostGator was sucking eggs. It's a little pricier than usual (like 18$/mo) but it all works out in the end. That way, none of the site data is actually on any of my home rigs, but I still have full access to whatever I need if I got innernets.

I ran one from home on comcast.. worked for a day of testing till they emailed me not allowing home users to run websites.. they must watch port 80 closely...

Yeah, I've been reading about Port 80... I suppose that if there's a remote host then I can still use teh int3rnetz to make any changes I want, correct? As in they merely host the thing, I control the content and can change,/modify/improve it as I see fit when I want and do that from wherever I can get access.

You do not even want to even try hosting at home. Proper server setup is a level of geekery most people don't even try. You need to understand the HTTP stack, Apache configs, DNS records and all sorts of other stuff you just don't really want to have to worry about. And that's even before you deal with your ISP (who won't let you do it anyway) and the pains of the inevitable downtime.

These days, you can get perfectly adequate starter hosting for less than 10 bucks a month. Do that. Then actually keeping the site up and running on the web is more or less their problem, not yours.

What you DO need to be worrying about is how you'll actually put something up. Wordpress is a fine solution, IF what you're doing is remotely bloglike. It can be extended a lot, but in its heart it's still a blog engine. If you've got something else in mind, well, you'll need to figure out what's the best way to get you to where you want to go.

And whatever you do, avoid taking credit card payments on the site. Trust me, you don't even want to know what kind of nightmare that is.

One of the things I'm wanting to do is avoid that whole credit card thing. What I have in mind is not that type of site, i.e. it's not a sales site. I'm going to look into Wordpress. I am thinking the way it works is I use that to 'design' my site and then upload it for remote hosting, or am I way off base?

For my personal curiosity....

Regarding taking credit cards- is this a suggestion that credit cards and online sales are a nightmare unto themselves, or that payments should be received through another site like PayPal or an online shopping cart so you are not personally managing it?

Inquiring minds want to know...

In reply to Curmudgeon:

Wordpress is a sort of CMS (content management system) that runs on the server. IIRC, you can choose themes to get it to look more or less like you want, and/or you can dig into it to customize it further by editing the HTML, PHP, styles, plugins to add functionality. But once you've got it more or less where you want it, it draws its content from a database, and you use its admin interface to upload files and edit that content.

It sounds like you might have been thinking of it as something like one of the WYSIWYG editors (like Dreamweaver), and that's not so much what it is as a semi-prefab, adaptable website.

Since it's not a direct accept money kind of idea, WP might be all I need, at least to start. I'll look into Dreamweaver further, though.

BTW, I'm the webmaster for a local car club. I can't tell you how much easier it is to have someone else deal with the servers and only have to worry about content.