My Web Hosting - Hosting at home – Good or Bad?

It’s probably crossed your mind on one or more occasions that you might be better off hosting your website or websites in the comfort of your own cable or DSL connection at home, but you never knew what exactly was involved in all this? You probably thought, hey, internet connectivity and a computer to host the web files and you’re there. Well, my web hosting, it’s not quite that simple. Lets first take a look at feasibility:

• Does your website require ecommerce?
• Will your site be a high traffic website?
• Other than a personal hobby, will your site be any sort of value and will the information on it be important?
• Do you need any other hardware or software to make it work?
• What websites should I not host at home? period!

Going through the list from top to bottom, we’ll start with number 1. Unless you have a proper incoming connection, it’s definitely not a good idea to bring any sort of ecommerce capable website into the comfort of your own home because you will need to make sure that you have a static IP. Most internet home providers will not give you a static IP. What is a static IP? It’s an internet address made of numbers which in computer terms is how the internet translates your website (see wikipedia). The IP address is important for many things, but most importantly for security because you will need to purchase a secure socket layer (ssl) which is needed for encryption on sensitive information when people give their details to you for purchase. Additionally, search engine optimization (SEO) may require a static IP to index better and give you better organic searches in high positions in their search criteria. In the end, you will have to either pay more for the privilege of having your own IP or be forced to upgrade to your providers “business” account which usually is many times higher than a regular home connection.

If you can get around option number 1 then you will want to know that if your website(s) is a high trafficked one, you will be suspended or find a large invoice waiting or is already charged to your credit card at the end of the month. This time you will have to upgrade or a business account and pay loads more then you would have had you gone straight to a web hosting company.

My Web Hosting - Hosting my personal blog

The only case where hosting at home might be viable is having a personal blog, gallery or family site that does not get too much traffic, does not need any special features and won’t interfere with anything that isn’t already there, but you will have to install some software on your end to get this started. If you are not technically savvy, you might run into problems as you will need to install a webserver such as “apache” (see wikipedia), email server, blog software, gallery software or anything else that you might find interesting to add to your site. This is not meant to scare you, but this is reality as most people are not aware at what is involved, even in its simplest sense. On the whole, web hosting at home is not entirely a bad idea, but in most cases, not the best idea. The pros are that you definitely have full control over your data and there is no time used for uploading webfiles to the host servers as everything would be right on your desktop. That said, what if your hard drive crashed or you get the blue screen of death and your files are corrupt? Do you or would you have even considered to purchase a second drive to back things up? This sounds pretty much common sense, but in practice, it’s never done, not to mention that you are going to be using your computers for other work related or personal tasks which can affect the performance of your website. If you’re like me and have 20 windows open at the same time, you’ve already taken up most of your system resources, not to mention the software required to run the website, must be on at all times. Keep that in mind and essentially, you really need a separate dedicated machine or it really won’t be worth hosting. I strongly advise not hosting business, high trafficked or websites with a lot of data at home as there is actually more opportunity for failure and disappointment. Web hosting companies have high-end expensive servers that are dedicated to this job and are made to handle most circumstances.

Here is what hosting your website with a web host can do for you:

• Provide all the software needed to make your website function
• Give you dedicated space for your website
• Allow you do grow and have all the tools you need IF you need them
• Provide additional data integrity and keep the flow off your system
• Way more cost effective
• Doesn’t take away from your home computer’s resources and allows you to use your home computer as an additional place to backup your files

Web hosting works out to about as much as 2 large Cappuccino’s per month these days and it saves you from many possible things that could go wrong if you hosted at home. Consider hosting as an investment and you always want to go for the lowest risk for the most benefit. Ultimately, the safest and most secure way of web hosting.