This website is running on my own computer in my basement office at home. For a while, I had been thinking of finding a web hosting company to host my site, but it seemed to be too expensive for me.
A web hosting solution starts around $10 per month (typically for Linux at this low end), but if you need to go for a Windows host with SQL server and extra disk space, the cost could easily run up to $50 or more.
One of my goals for creating this website is to share my photos and videos with my families and friends. Given the disk space required, the only viable solution is to host my own website.
About a year ago, while I was still working at Strong (now bought by Wells Fargo) one of my co-workers suggested that using a dynamic IP domain name service such as DynDns could be a nice solution. And as it turned out, it worked quite well.
There are lots of good things about hosting your own website: you have full control over your own machine and you can do pretty much everything you want on it (e.g. you can change settings easily; there is no limitation on disk space). On the other hand, the reliability of your broadband connection and the limitation of uplink speed imposed by most broadband service providers are the major drawbacks.
I have a basic DSL broadband connection (1.5M down, 384K up). For the past couple of months, the service had been down for at least 3 times and each time down for at least 10 hours. I guess that for the purpose of what I am doing, this is OK. In the future, I might need to switch to a more reliable connection method (e.g. a business class solution). A 384K upload speed (it is the downloading speed when you are visiting this website) is pretty slow, but surprisingly, I had no problem serving images and low band-width streaming videos so far.
The following is a picture of my webserver when just assembled:
This website is running on my own computer in my basement office at home. For a while, I had been thinking of finding a web hosting company to host my site, but it seemed to be too expensive for me.
A web hosting solution starts around $10 per month (typically for Linux at this low end), but if you need to go for a Windows host with SQL server and extra disk space, the cost could easily run up to $50 or more.
One of my goals for creating this website is to share my photos and videos with my families and friends. Given the disk space required, the only viable solution is to host my own website.
About a year ago, while I was still working at Strong (now bought by Wells Fargo) one of my co-workers suggested that using a dynamic IP domain name service such as DynDns could be a nice solution. And as it turned out, it worked quite well.
There are lots of good things about hosting your own website: you have full control over your own machine and you can do pretty much everything you want on it (e.g. you can change settings easily; there is no limitation on disk space). On the other hand, the reliability of your broadband connection and the limitation of uplink speed imposed by most broadband service providers are the major drawbacks.
I have a basic DSL broadband connection (1.5M down, 384K up). For the past couple of months, the service had been down for at least 3 times and each time down for at least 10 hours. I guess that for the purpose of what I am doing, this is OK. In the future, I might need to switch to a more reliable connection method (e.g. a business class solution). A 384K upload speed (it is the downloading speed when you are visiting this website) is pretty slow, but surprisingly, I had no problem serving images and low band-width streaming videos so far.
The following is a picture of my webserver when just assembled:
Pentium 4 3.0G
2GB DDR400 RAM
Currently, I partitioned the server into 3 virtual servers, and the website is running on one of them.
