Web Server

Building a website can be a great way to learn coding and document a subject that means a lot to you (cough* home servers!), so when completed it can be tricky to find a web host that is cheap and able to deliver the site if technologies like databases are involved. Alternatively a blogging site such as Wordpress is required but without the advertising that it forced upon free services by providers.

By using a home server to deliver websites to the world it will not suffer the usual constraints that come with hosting companies and at a much lower cost, and have control over what, if any adverts are on the pages.

Let's not kid though, the website is not going to compete with Netflix for global data traffic share and there are some hurdles and limitations to negotiate to get a functioning website. Since it will be using a comparatively slow home internet connection, websites served won't be aiming for a great number of visitors at a time, however it will still do well for hobbyist site and the like.

My first experience of home servers was to be able to run a website, so I am well clued as to how getting a site online is done, it's not too complicated but there's a lot to consider.

Hardware

For a server perspective hosting a small website is not too challenging for a machine, a fairly modern desktop computer will serve with ease. Introducing dynamic content an databases such as PHP, ASP.NET and SQL with create a bit of performance load but for the number of users that can handle the site it should get by with little problems. With a home server the bottleneck is not so much the PC hardware but the internet connection, as home internet bandwidth will become saturated by visitors long before the server does.

What is a must have requirement for web servers is reliability, the Internet does not have opening hours so the server must be ready at all times to serve up pages. Therefore an old computer lying around that has a good history of reliability could be an ideal candidate for a web server. To help system uptime, a wired Ethernet connection is strongly recommended as WiFi just doesn't stack up on the reliability marks as wireless. Also once it is serving up pages its best to leave it alone, as a server that is switched off or disconnected from the network while you fettle with it is not doing its job, easily said but was hard for me to put into practise.