Very Computer

First, most ISP's TOS's don't allow their customers to run web servers.
If they don't, they usually block port 80. I've been running a web
server on my DSL line for about 2 years now. Earthlink, my ISP, allows
this and does not block port 80. I cannot speak of other providers. DSL
providers are limited in most areas. It might be better for you to
determine which one's provide service in your area and then ask which
one's are recommended. Sure would narrow down the possiblities.

I'm assuming that your 100k hits/day actually should be 100 hits. With
that many hits and 1.5 gig/day, I'd say your upstream speed would be
maxed out 24/7. Mine is pretty good at 400k and putting out that much
data left it maxed out most of the time. Really cut into my use of the
line as well. Earthlink offers a business DSL line that puts out 1.5Mbps
best effort upstream speed at about $70/month. Of course, a $40 DLS line
and a seperate web host would cost about the same.

You also need to find out if the providers in your area offer dynamic or
static IP addresses. If dynamic, you would probably need to use a
dynamic IP service or pay out the nose for a static IP address from the
ISP.

Again, little good advise can be given w/o knowing more about what
choices you have. How can anyone tell you what a connection will be like
when we don't know your area or the ISPs offering DSL in that area.

I think it's really dependant on the area you are in and the ISP you are
using.  I used XO business DSL to host web sites for about 2 years with very
good luck.  About 10 outages over the two years, none more than a few
minutes.  You're most certainly going to need to go with a business class
line, which typically gives a good install experience.  With that many hits,
I would presume you are looking at either a 768kbps or 1.5Mbps sdsl line.

Again, the stability really depends on your local phone company, how active
development is in your area (things breaking telephone lines, new subs being
connected over top of other circuits, etc) and the ISP you are connecting
to.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org

Quote:> Hello,

> I run a Web site that gets 100k hits/day and bandwidth consumption is
> 1.5 GB/day. I'm considering moving it to a home DSL line. Would you
> share your experience in running a Web and mail server at home on DSL?
> Is it a good idea? How reliable is the connection generally? What is
> your experience in getting the bandwidth ordered? Any advice, tidbits,
> suggestions, gotchas?

> If the general idea seems to be, "Yes, it is doable and recommended",
> what
> providers have good reputation?

> Thanks for all your help!

Quote:

> I run a Web site that gets 100k hits/day and bandwidth consumption is
> 1.5 GB/day. I'm considering moving it to a home DSL line. Would you
> share your experience in running a Web and mail server at home on DSL?
> Is it a good idea? How reliable is the connection generally? What is
> your experience in getting the bandwidth ordered? Any advice, tidbits,
> suggestions, gotchas?

> If the general idea seems to be, "Yes, it is doable and recommended",
> what providers have good reputation?

It works easiet and best with static IP (usually a business account), but
there are third party DNS hosting services that can point a name at a
dynamic IP.  However, you need to check if your ISP would block incoming
port 80 (expecially in light of all the IIS worms) or otherwise
discourages home grown webservers from jamming their bandwidth.

One example is h14me.yi.org (alias theunixplace.com) which has free Unix
(Linux) shell accounts and user webspace (with your own virtual
username.theunixplace.com subdomain).  Actually it is just a kid's box in
his bedroom connected by (dynamic) dsl.

--
David Efflandt - All spam is ignored - http://www.de-srv.com/
http://www.autox.chicago.il.us/  http://www.berniesfloral.net/
http://cgi-help.virtualave.net/  http://hammer.prohosting.com/~cgi-wiz/

In general, home based DSL isn't marketed as having commercial grade
reliability.  With that much use, I wouldn't recommend going home based
DSL.  Ask yourself if a day, or a week, without service, would be a big
problem.  If you are simply doing this for a hobby, and all that traffic
doesn't mean the life or death of your business, perhaps you could do
it and not worry about the potential downtime.  If, however, that
connection is as "mission critical" as the ammount of traffic tends
to indicate, a commercial grade T-1 direct to your home would be
more appropriate.  Yes, it DOES cost more, to the tune of well over
$500 a month, in most cases (triple that probably more common), but
if you need the reliability, a consumer (or even business grade) DSL
connection is a poor substitute.

If you DO decide to go DSL--that you CAN do without a connection
for a day or a week, or even longer, should the worst happen--with
that kind of traffic, assumed to be outgoing to a large extent, you will
likely want SDSL, rather than RADSL/ADSL.  SDSL is often considered
more of a business grade service, with better minimum terms than
ADSL/RADSL, but it still doesn't generally approach T-1 or better
service, reliability-wise.  You would want at least 768kbps SDSL, most
likely, with 1.1Mbps or 1.5Mbps possibly more appropriate, depending
on your demand pattern.  Any ISP offering those levels of SDSL service
likely is PLANNING on you using them for hosting, and the cost won't
be cheap, although it will probably be cheaper than T-1 or similar
service (with less of a guarantee, however).

I know my ISP (Speakeasy.net) offers at least 1.1M SDSL, possibly
1.5M, but as I am a lowly 608/128kbps RADSL user, I wouldn't have
the foggiest as to whether they could be recommended or not, at that
level.  I DO know they are financially stable, and since Covad came
out of bankrupty, you shouldn't have to worry about THAT side
of the equation in the near future.

DSLReports is a good place to do comparitive research on what is
available to you and how they compare--user ratings included.
According to their weekly ratings here: http://www.dslreports.com/gbu
SE is listed (on average) pretty high, but UUNet and MegaPath
rank higher (with UUNet not having enough ratings to be on the top
chart, see the ones further down).  Those are the national ISPs.
You will also want to see if any well rated regional ISPs serve your
area--they are at the bottom of the page.

--
Duncan -- If posted to a newsgroup, replies there get my priority.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin

Quote:> Hello,

> I run a Web site that gets 100k hits/day and bandwidth consumption is
> 1.5 GB/day. I'm considering moving it to a home DSL line. Would you
> share your experience in running a Web and mail server at home on DSL?
> Is it a good idea? How reliable is the connection generally? What is
> your experience in getting the bandwidth ordered? Any advice, tidbits,
> suggestions, gotchas?

First, I'd like to emphasize a point that's been mentioned, but not
emphasized, in other posts: DSL comes in several different varieties
and service classes. As others have suggested, attempting to run a Web
site like yours on consumer-grade ADSL is probably a mistake, unless
this is nothing more than a hobby and you don't mind it going down.
Even then, many residential DSL accounts forbid servers. Furthermore,
if I did the math right, 1.5GB/day works out to 146Kbps, on average.
Given that the average residential ADSL account only provides about
100Kbps upstream capacity, you won't be able to run your site on such a
connection. You might try it with some high-end account that provides,
say, 300Kbps upstream, but even then you're likely to have problems
during busy periods.

OTOH, if you want to get a business-grade SDSL account, that's another
matter. You're more likely to get reliable service, and less likely to
be hassled by your ISP, if you do this. The symmetrical nature of SDSL
also means that it's more capable of handling the heavy upstream loads
you'll be seeing -- a 1.5Mbps SDSL account is 1.5Mbps both ways, and
that's probably acceptable for your Web site. Of course, you should be
careful when you pick your provider -- I'm assuming that reliability is
important to you, so you want a provider that's got a good reputation
and gives acceptable service guarantees. Check http://www.dslreports.com
for user discussion of various DSL providers.

For still more reliable connections, you might look into higher-end
business services like a T-1 or partial T-1, or look into co-location
(placing a computer you own at an ISP's office) or a Web hosting
service. (Presumably you're using one of these now, though.)

--

http://www.rodsbooks.com
Author of books on Linux & multi-OS configuration

It can be done, and it can be quite an adventure, but I don't recommend it.
You are at the mercy of your DSL provider, your phone company, and your
residential electric service. It's simply more peaceful to use a hosting
company, or colocate at a good data center if you want the whole server.

Verizon blocked port 80 recently so don't use them.

Quote:> Hello,

> I run a Web site that gets 100k hits/day and bandwidth consumption is
> 1.5 GB/day. I'm considering moving it to a home DSL line. Would you
> share your experience in running a Web and mail server at home on DSL?
> Is it a good idea? How reliable is the connection generally? What is
> your experience in getting the bandwidth ordered? Any advice, tidbits,
> suggestions, gotchas?

> If the general idea seems to be, "Yes, it is doable and recommended",
> what
> providers have good reputation?

> Thanks for all your help!

I have a site that generates about 500-1000 page views a day on my
home DSL line 768/384. I use to have the email server set up on it but
wanted to reduce traffic so I have my email hosted at another provider
and this also gives me the ability to have my viewers sign up for

I run RedHat, PHP, and MYSQL and the CMS (Content Management System) I
use is pretty resource intensive, but I have had a high number of
concurrent people on my site. If your ISP let's you get away with it
go for it, but look at how many concurrent people are hitting your
site at once, because anything short of T1 and the bottleneck will
most likely be your bandwidth and not your server.

Sam C
----
"Nuke'd Your Home, Yet?"
Run you own home web server
http://www.homenuke.com

Sam,

Who is your email provider?  Do you recommned them and what is the cost?

Regards,
Ali

Ali,

My email provider that I'm using for the site is oemmail.com they are
a good provider, but I can't tell you the long term relationship I
have had with them since I've only been with them for about 2 days,
but they offer web mail (like Yahoo, MSN, etc..), POP3 services, and
WAP services (this is the one that sold me). If you just want 3 Megs
of space for you and any of your users than it's free but you have to
put up with ads. I went for the paid service I pay about $10/month for
100 email boxes, but it is a way to give back to the community of
memebers who visit your site. I just recently found out about
everyone.net as well be sure to check both of them out and let me know
what you think.

Sam C
----
"Nuke'd Your Home, Yet?"
Run your own PostNuke based web server from home
http://www.homenuke.com

I paid out the nose for a 1.1 MB line from Qwest, with ISP service from
NWLink and had nothing but problems the entire time. I was paying over
$240/month for the line, the ISP, and the bandwidth, and I was only at 1.2
GB /month. My service *continually* went down, one time for 3 weeks before
magically coming back on it's own (Qwest was scheduled to be out in 2 more
weeks to look at it. Yes, they make up their own RLA as they go) The Qwest
service was absolutely terrible requiring technicians on-site 4 times in 2
months at $70 per pop to fix their previous mistakes. I still owe them $250.
Though NWLink is a very good company with whom I had no problems.

My advice would be to pay the tiny fee for hosting services and save
yourself alot of money and headache. But if you do decide to venture down
this dark and lonely path, stroll.

Quote:> Hello,

> I run a Web site that gets 100k hits/day and bandwidth consumption is
> 1.5 GB/day. I'm considering moving it to a home DSL line. Would you
> share your experience in running a Web and mail server at home on DSL?
> Is it a good idea? How reliable is the connection generally? What is
> your experience in getting the bandwidth ordered? Any advice, tidbits,
> suggestions, gotchas?

> If the general idea seems to be, "Yes, it is doable and recommended",
> what
> providers have good reputation?

> Thanks for all your help!

Note that the 100,000 hits per day that the OP reports is 100x to 200x
what you're handling with your site, although of course whether your
"page views" are equivalent to the OP's "hits" is uncertain at best, and
the size of the documents is an important factor. Still, it seems likely
that the OP's site requires at least one order of magnitude more
bandwidth than does yours, quite possibly two orders of magnitude.

For personal use, I'd expect the traffic generated for a mail server
would be substantially less than that generated by a Web server that
fields 500-1000 page views a day. Furthermore, if you use that
connection to retrieve your mail from your mail hosting site, the
bandwidth use for mail should be in the same ballpark whether the
transfers are initiated on your side (say, via POP or IMAP) or by the
sender (via IMAP and an IMAP server). In fact, it could conceivably be
higher if an outside provider handles your mail (if you poll for mail
often enough when there's none to retrieve, or if you use anti-spam
measures that prevent the transfer of messages via SMTP but not via POP
or IMAP). OTOH, if you misconfigure your mail server so that it's an
open relay, there's always the chance that it'll be abused by a
spammer, chewing up all of your bandwidth for quite a while.

Your final comment, though, suggests that people who don't use your DSL
connection are using your domain name for e-mail. An outside mail
hosting provider would probably reduce your bandwidth use in that
situation, if the number of such users is more than trivial, since such
outside users would create two accesses for each e-mail (once for your
server's receiving it, and another when the user retrieves it from your
server). Using the off-site hosting service, of course, eliminates this
DSL access use.

--

http://www.rodsbooks.com
Author of books on Linux & multi-OS configuration

You know Rod I really never thought of those issues, and you do bring
up some valid points. One of the other reason I moved services to a
different server is I did not want to meddle with security. I am a
total LINUX newbie, and just getting the site up took me 3 days. I'm
trying not to open any more ports on my router than I have to. I also
found some interesting note on the web concerning the security of
Sendmail.

Rod, I like the information on your site, can I post a link to your
site from mine? And do you have any news stories or articles that you
have written that would target the home server web audience? I would
appreciate it.

Sam C
----
"Nuke'd Your Home, Yet?"
Run your own PostNuke based web server from home
http://www.homenuke.com

[Posted and mailed]

[re: issues of bandwidth usage for self-hosted vs. outside hosting of
a mail server]

Quote:> You know Rod I really never thought of those issues, and you do bring
> up some valid points. One of the other reason I moved services to a
> different server is I did not want to meddle with security. I am a
> total LINUX newbie, and just getting the site up took me 3 days. I'm
> trying not to open any more ports on my router than I have to. I also
> found some interesting note on the web concerning the security of
> Sendmail.

Security concerns are certainly a very valid reason to use a hosting
service rather than run servers on your own system, particularly if
you're unfamiliar with the issues or unwilling to invest the effort in
keeping up to date on security issues. This is certainly true of mail
servers as well as Web servers -- although some of the recent worms
have been targeted at Web servers, mail servers are also potentially
vulnerable.

As to sendmail specifically, it had a pretty bad reputation about three
years ago, but it's improved significantly since then. There are also
other options for Linux and UNIX, such as Postfix and qmail, that were
designed with security in mind from the start, and that have good
security histories. Of course, none of this is to say that security
problems in any of these programs won't be found in the future. In
terms of mail servers, there's also the security-like issue of relay
configuration; a misconfiguration on this point can leave your server
vulnerable to abuse by spammers.

Quote:> Rod, I like the information on your site, can I post a link to your
> site from mine?

Thanks; you can certainly link to my site.

Quote:> And do you have any news stories or articles that you
> have written that would target the home server web audience? I would
> appreciate it.

Nothing small and online, I'm afraid. There is a chapter on this issue
in my book, _Broadband Internet Connections_
(http://www.rodsbooks.com/broadband/), and several other chapters are
relevant to somebody wanting to do this (domain issues, security,
etc.).

--

http://www.rodsbooks.com
Author of books on Linux & multi-OS configuration

Jay Beale's articles about securing linux servers are a must-read:

 http://www.bastille-linux.org/jay/security-articles-jjb.html

Especially the article on killing daemons:

 http://www.bastille-linux.org/jay/killing-daemons.html