Phil’s Diary - [Blog @ http://www.philsdiary.net/]
Dan Seto notes here that if he had a static IP he’d save himself some money and host things himself.
I’ve got to say I was a little apprehensive going into doing the whole “own hosting” thing. And there were a few little wrinkles early on (mainly due to my inexperience with Linux), but on the whole I’ve been really very lucky.
I’ve no special machine, just an old Celeron 300A that I whacked a spare stick of memory and harddisk in, an ADSL Modem/Router/Firewall and Linux. I’ve not bothered with a UPS, nor done a special sort of maintenance and build. I just did a default install of Red-Hat (8 I think), tweaked a few scripts so that the mail did what I want, the spam got filtered, the web pages hosted and so on.
I still learn things (for example the SHTML stuff on MusingsOf.Us), and there are still the odd problems with me messing up a config script, but on the whole it’s been pretty hassle free. I guess I got luck with the ISP, have been lucky with the machine and Linux… well it’s just pretty good at this sort of thing.
I guess I was willing to take the risk because it was all unimportant to me… heck in the early days I even had a backup forwarding of my email. So at the end of the day, a temporarily lost website would have been it. Big deal.
If your stuff is non-critical (and you don’t mind when it doesn’t work for a short while), and you’ve found your ISP pretty reliable and trouble free to date… I’d think about it too.
Posted by Phil on May 26, 2004 09:22 PM | Categories: Technology
Of course, you're going to have a few days of downtime when you move house :-)
Posted by: Phil at May 28, 2004 11:39 AM