Saturday, July 25, 2009

Hosting Your Own Website

By Stephen Grisham Sr.

When it comes to web hosting, the economist Adam Smith's theories of labor division really apply. It may seem like a good, money-saving idea to be your own web host, but there's much more involved than it appears at first glance. Prior to purchasing any web site hosting equipment, consider everything that being your own web host will entail.

Server: A server is a very powerful computer that is specially configured to deal with network tasks. For a short time, you may be able to get away with buying your own server for a small-scale business. Both IBM and Hewlett Packard offer quality servers. In addition, Dell is a good server provider.

Security: Securing your Server is probably the most difficult part of doing your own website hosting. Network Security specialists are trying to keep up with the hackers and spammers (not the other way around). Server Security is a highly technical task that never ends. It is certainly not a matter of installing an antivirus or internet security program. Unless you have a Certified Administrator or equivalent on staff, you'll probably need to forget doing your own hosting.

Software Licensing: The majority of server operating systems are licensed for a given amount of simultaneous users. Getting licenses to cover your software can be really costly.

Network: It's necessary to obtain a data trunk at the location you wish to keep your server in. Directly connecting the server to your ISP very likely won't work at all. Some people go that route for personal websites and trial runs; however, you should not try that in hosting your own website or your bandwidth will be reduced. Examine the terms of service of your ISP if you only have an undersized website.

You will also need to acquire equipment like a handy off-site backup system for your data, as well as a sturdy battery backup to take care of power glitches.

Employees: If you are short a network guru employee, then you must hire one who is available 24/7 with on call support. Servers and networks go bad all the time, the best ones included. You cannot just set it up and then just leave it be, for long. Absolutely not!

Bottom Line: Your website will benefit from the powerful and reliable servers that leased web hosting will provide, saving you a large expenditure on hardware and labor. Unless you have an enormous amount of web traffic and a full-time IT staff, it will be much more costly and will cause many problems for you to host your own website. It is possible to find quality shared web hosting for sites that aren't sizable, beginning around $10 monthly. It would be pretty hard to do better than that! - 22787

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