Pros and Cons

 
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Arctic
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Joined: 24 Sep 2004
Posts: 560

PostPosted: Wed Nov 10, 2004 4:34 am    Post subject: Pros and Cons Reply with quote

My good friend wants to know the pros and cons of running his site off of his computer. He runs it off of geocities right now. Can you tell me so I can tell him the pros and cons? I got a few, but I'm stumped.
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Anonymoose
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Joined: 09 Sep 2003
Posts: 2192

PostPosted: Wed Nov 10, 2004 10:46 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Pros :
    Full control over the server
    Installation of whatever scripting languages you wish to use eg. PHP, Perl etc
    Unlimited space for your site (subject to space on his own PC of course)
    Unlimited bandwidth (subject to any ISP restrictions on his connection)
    No restrictions on what kind of file can be hosted
    No restrictions on content
    No waiting for site to upload via the horrible Geocities HTTP uploader
    No popups/banner adverts/junk.


Cons :
    Relies on you having a decent upstream (uploading speed) on your cable/DSL connection - he is very unlikely to have anywhere near the speed available from Geocities, users will not enjoy visiting a 'slow' site. This will be dependent on what sort of files he wishes to serve up.
    PC must be on for the site to be accessible.
    Using your upstream for serving websites may slow your downloading.
    May be against your ISPs ToS.
    ISP may block port 80, making it harder for normal users to access the site.
    Some users struggle to setup port forwarding on their router. If they configure their router incorrectly, may leave them more open to attack by worms etc.
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senshi
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Joined: 05 Nov 2003
Posts: 385
Location: UK

PostPosted: Tue Nov 23, 2004 1:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Unless your expecting a few 100 visitors a day, your wasting resources, it is often better to get hosted services until your at a capacity and have the required bandwidth to run a service from home.

BTW, nothing wrong with geocities, its free and I know of several people who run buisnesses sucessfully form their hosted web space. You also negate any extra costs that your current ISP can dump on you so beware, one net buddy got landed with an extra $80 on top of her usual $15.99 because people hot linked to content and that sent her bandwidth quota off scale.

So if you run from home, get an unmetered account which will cost allot as its at a premium.

Theirs lots of tip n tricks to get bandwidth down, biggest being images, hoting all non-essential content off server is preferable as this can account for most of your bandwidth use, an average well written web page will be about 5 or 6kb tops, an image is 3 or 4 times that when compressed but normally an image will account for most if not all the bandwidth you use, simply putting into hosted space and referenced in the HTML you serve up from your serve will lower your bandwidth, make serving from home faster, I have a little tweak that makes Abyss serve up like lightening but that for the moment is top sekret.

AND! It all depends on what your using the server for, what is the content being served?
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Arctic
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Joined: 24 Sep 2004
Posts: 560

PostPosted: Tue Nov 23, 2004 2:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

images, comics.
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senshi
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Joined: 05 Nov 2003
Posts: 385
Location: UK

PostPosted: Sat Nov 27, 2004 2:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

That will use allot of bandwiidth unless you deploy some content, the usage on your domestic account may cause your ISP to pass out of have convuslive fits or just pass your account over to billing to extract more money out of you, it will be hard to say, but to save you allot of headaches and tgetting into trouble with your ISP, a little stragitic planning and a bit of coding on your part, you could have a very low bandwidth useage site and still beable to fully control your machine and what it serves by maniulating your html code.

How much of a page designer are you? know nay scripting languages? anything that you can use to your advantage, use it, your main aim is to use as much free stuff as you can, you could also build some image redundancy in as far as the alternate source could be specified should your main URL fail, but thats all down to planning.

Do you know the capacity of your modem, your alloted traffic limit per month? you will need to makesure that you dont go over the allocation, if you have not been told, be assured that each ISP does operate some form of metering, even on unmetered accounts trafic is metered as they need to know whos using the bandwidth and to verify that they themselves are not being over charged by the network carriers.

So Like I suggested, all the largest or often served images like backgrounds, logos and other stuff, is best off in your alloted webspace or on servers that serve up images.

You want to double check that your ISP doesnt already have some webspace set aside for you, if they have, grab your login details and the URL address, this will also be useful for putting up a bulk of your website and then the more specialist items like forum boards etc, can be hosted from your machine.

Dont know what else to suggest other than do as much as you can to limit the impact on your internet connection, last thing you want is a suprise bill with an extra $100 added for excessive bandwidth useage.
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