Hi, I want to run a small web sever from home. Currently our hosting is a bit expensive and the service is disappointing. We have about 25 small sites, mostly HTML sites. The are about 5 of them which use PHP & MySQL. What are the hardware specs I should look at? Also I am considering on loading it with CentOS & ISPConfig This would then just be for the hosting of the sites and the email accounts.
System requirements at home Hi Heinz09, You can install ISPConfig with Centos on a Pentium III or IV pc with at least 500 MB internal memory, so let's say a normal pc from some years old. For the amount of sites you want to host, you even do not need a huge hdd. (My first Debian server with ISPConfig was an old IBM Pentium II with 384 MB and with my fast DSL line, i was not disappointed at all). I used that old IBM to teach about Linux and ISPConfig as well. The speed of your websites does not only depend on the server-hardware. Also the speed of your DSL-connection is important. Especially the upload speed. You also have to know that some ISP's are blocking port 25, because of their anti-spam policy. So sending email via your own mailserver, sometimes is not possible. For this reason i recommend to choose an ISP, which provides what you need. If you're disapointed or do not want to have a server at home for any reason...of course i like to host your sites as well for a special price.
So if I have let's say a 4096kbs line with a nice AMD 3ghz and 2gb of memory it should be able to run everything without a problem as long as my isp doesn't screw around on my ports? sweet... Thanx
if you don't have a dedicated IP then setting up a mailserver can cause trouble... most mailservers reject emails originating from a mailserver with a dynamic ip...
Heinz09, I run exactly that, and I agree with sjau, you will definitely need a fixed IP address from your ISP. The other area to watch is SSl certificates, as you can normally only have 1 certificate per IP address. It is possible to set up 1 certificate for a server and all it's websites using subjectAltName lines in the certificate, but it is a bit more complicated than simply loading a certificate.
Well, dedicated IP is only needed if you also want to have mail through your server... And regarding the SSL certificates? You only need that if you want to offer some SSL-worth stuff... if you just setup a normal webpage I don't see a reason to get a ssl certificate...
sjau, Heinz09 mentioned 5 or so PHP/MySQl sites. If you are collecting any sort of personal information about site visitors, members or customers, I think some form of security/encryption would be a very good idea.
Depending on the information... I actually see very little use for SSL... mostly when it's high confidential data like online banking...
