On 2014-02-19 16:45, keith smith wrote:
> I have cox cable and switched from residential cable to business
> cable for just for that purpose. It cost me $25/mo more to do so and I
> am able to run a server.

Cox residential blocks inbound port 80 (naturally) but doesn't block
inbound port 443.  Of course, it's probably against the TOS to run your
apache on a residential connection.

> My AWS3 backups run about $6/mo and I don't know how much extra
> electricity my web server uses.  I figure a battery backup is
> a necessity so that is an added expense.

My home box doesn't need to be on 24/7, so I've put it and the
cablemodem and the router on a power strip.  Suspend-to-disk in the
morning, power off before leaving work, and I should be able to save a
few pennies in the summer as all those heat-generating things are
totally off during the hottest parts of the day.

> I miss WHM/cPanel. And I miss GoDaddy's webmail.

There are things that work sort of like cpanel.  You can even buy a
cpanel license, but I think it only works well with CentOS/RHEL.  There
are a number of Free webmail server-side interfaces like roundcube and
squirrelmail--I'm using roundcube to write this.  It's got all the basic
stuff you'd need and has plugins for additional functionality.  (Its web
interface kind of barfs on Android in landscape mode, which is annoying,
but that's why K-9 Mail exists.)  You can also pay the developers for
custom stuff and/or support, IIRC.

The problem is that all of these webmail things require that you
install and configure an SMTP server and an IMAP server.  This can get
insanely complicated if you're supporting hundreds of users and hundreds
of G of mail, but it can be much simpler if you've got just a few users.

> My Internet connection services several computers, so if
> there are several people streaming video, I wonder how that
> affects the bandwidth needed for the web server?

Hm.  What are the claimed up/down speeds you're supposed to get?  1K
HTTP GET up can be a 100K JPEG down (or whatever) so residential stuff's
always down-biased.  The next time several people are downloading a
bunch of stuff, try hitting your webserver from another connection
(phone?), and see how it performs.  If it's reasonably fast, no worries.

> At this point, for me, I think a home server is the best
> bang for the buck.

I thought about this too, because I can get 1T of disk in a home box
quite cheaply, and the same amount of disk would be insanely expensive
in any VPS.  The money math didn't really work out for me though, and I
don't need to have *all* my data Net-accessible all the time.  YMMV,
naturally.

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