Personal Web Server Build: What Determines Bandwidth?

[DrumnBassBBoy]

Since I started developing, I have heard this term thrown around a lot. I am looking into building my own server for hosting a few small sites, and development purposes. I am trying to figure out this "bandwidth" situation. When building my system, what exactly determines my bandwidth? Is it a combo of things? Is it my ISP? I would think my ISP, processor, and ram would have something to do with it...

 

[kmote]

Just ISP.

 

[Strikr]

The problem is to efficiently host Websites. You need a decent line. Problem is, these dedicated lines cost a fortune. I can tell you from experience, you are looking at a few thousand dollars for that. Maybe a more soluted option is to find someone who is hosting that server for you. Gives you FTP access for your own site.

Like a "friend" of mine does. He allows this person unlimited hosting for 300$ per year.

If you calculate in the Power, The Allocation, The Bandwidth, The Hardware, The 24/7 support. It costs alot in the long run.

A system alone is 6,000$ consumer price.

 

[mroselli]

Now if you're just wanting a web server for development, I simply use my own computer. I install a copy of XAMPP (an apache package), and I already have most of what I use installed (PHP, MySQL).

Connection is fairly slow, so I only use this for early development stages. For hosting actual sites for testing... you may want to think twice. Above posters are correct about needing a good line.

 

[Strikr]

Also if you decide to host you need a good internal network. Home routers are no good.
You also need a minimum 2 servers. On for IIS or Apache and the other for the database.


Take this for example. As of Monday, my company now supports BES. I have a 1 user BES in a Virtual Environment. (May not be the best example but its very similar for web hosting)

Having the Windows Server 2003 with Active Directory, Exchange Server and BES. At idle, my cpu is 89% and 2.23GB of RAM is used.

This system is running in a virtual environment, has a 2.6Ghz CPU and 2GB Ram with 80GB HDD assigned to it.

In production. This means I am looking at Intel Xeon quad cose with 8 processors, 8 GB Ram and about 250 GB in Raid 5. Literally this is gonna cost me a fortune but will benefit me highly in the future because I can move the Database off the system which will allocate RAM and HDD and allow it to run smoother but only the cost of that machine is a few thousand. I will pay 200$ a month for power. My server line is 200$ a month.

That alone I can tell you is going to cost me over 5,000$ this year for return in investment. I could go to Gator Host and get two servers for half that cost if I was not worried about all the other options.

I highly recommend outsourcing your hosting for a fraction of your cost.

 

[office politics]

Also if you decide to host you need a good internal network. Home routers are no good.
You also need a minimum 2 servers. On for IIS or Apache and the other for the database.


Take this for example. As of Monday, my company now supports BES. I have a 1 user BES in a Virtual Environment. (May not be the best example but its very similar for web hosting)

Having the Windows Server 2003 with Active Directory, Exchange Server and BES. At idle, my cpu is 89% and 2.23GB of RAM is used.

This system is running in a virtual environment, has a 2.6Ghz CPU and 2GB Ram with 80GB HDD assigned to it.

In production. This means I am looking at Intel Xeon quad cose with 8 processors, 8 GB Ram and about 250 GB in Raid 5. Literally this is gonna cost me a fortune but will benefit me highly in the future because I can move the Database off the system which will allocate RAM and HDD and allow it to run smoother but only the cost of that machine is a few thousand. I will pay 200$ a month for power. My server line is 200$ a month.

That alone I can tell you is going to cost me over 5,000$ this year for return in investment. I could go to Gator Host and get two servers for half that cost if I was not worried about all the other options.

I highly recommend outsourcing your hosting for a fraction of your cost.

i'd like to make a few comments about this post.

I'm not sure why you say home routers are no good for a internal network. As long as they support the required functionality, i think a home router would work fine. These routers should be able to handle the high amounts of traffic. This can be proven by asking anyone who downloads a massive amount of torrent data every month.

Also, it is not neccessary to host the database server separate from the web server. It will work functionally. This type of setup is typical for small office environments or devs test beds. However, hosting them on separate machines is best practice for reasons of security and stability.

About your vm setup, i would guess that Exchange is utilizing the largest portions of ram and cpu. For the OP, this might be replaced by SQL.

Outsourcing hosting is a good suggestion. I might look to hosting.com for their reseller package. They have good support and deal with many different devs doing the same thing.

 

[Strikr]

Home routers can only be as efficient as their memory allows it. I can tell you home routers cannot work a web server and database server. I have tested this on various home routers and they all crash. If he wants something to route. The best thing I can recommend is an old box with OpenBSD.

The system I was using was BES that used he most ressources.

 

[office politics]

you should have called the manufacturers tech support and / or invoked a warranty claim when the routers started crashing. I would bet money on the fact that I could get a home router to host a web & database server. Home routers do have memory limitations this is true. However, I think that routers are more limited by their firmware than memory. Was the firmware on the routers up to date? Did you try a open source firmware?

 

[zedman3d]

The Allocation, The Bandwidth, The Hardware, The 24/7 support. It costs alot in the long run.

A system alone is 6,000$ consumer price.

$6000 for a web server? Erm.... more like $600.

And yes, home modem/routers can deal with running a web server, a massive amount of people do this already, they arnt all wrong.

 

[mikesgroovin]

$6000 for a web server? Erm.... more like $600.

And yes, home modem/routers can deal with running a web server, a massive amount of people do this already, they arnt all wrong.

I can see justifying $6k for a nice system. A R710 with 2 Quads, 24GB ram, (3) 300GB Cheetahs running in Raid5 is about $5500 or so without an OS. With that you could run plenty of sites and, lets throw windows into the picture.... with that server you could run a couple of H-V VMs on server core (IIS and SQL) and then provide services that normal hosting companies provide (up to 10 sql DBs, stats engine, ftp, et cetera)..... OS really doesn't matter, just an example.

What is your thinking behind a $600 system? throw some specs out there....
I would be willing to bet that a $600 professional web server would make you hate life... you would be constantly maintaining it. Sure, you can build a web server for $600.... but a practical one that will last more than 6 months.... I have my doubts.