Hosting Your Own Website
Website hosting certainly falls under the purview Adam Smith’s doctrine of division of labor. On the surface it may seem like such a nice money saving idea to be your own web host, but there really is a lot to it. Prior to starting to purchase gear for web hosting, think of all that is entailed in terms of web hosting on your own.
Server: The word “server” means a powerful computer with certain custom networking abilities. You might be able to get by with a small server for a minimally sized business for a short time. Servers that are good are made by Hewlett Packard and IBM. Dell manufactures servers as well.
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 will be necessary to obtain a data trunk in the location where you want to base the server. It is highly unlikely that you will be able to just connect your server to your ISP. Some users try that for personal websites and playing around, but you should avoid doing that when hosting your own website as the ISP will restrict your bandwidth. If you are still convinced you want to do your own hosting, and your resource needs are minimal, look into the TOS (Terms of Service) with your ISP.
You will need additional equipment like a dependable off-site backup system to safeguard the data, and a reliable battery backup to handle power failures.
Employees: If you do not have an employee who is knowledgeable with regard to networks, it will be necessary for you to hire someone to be on call or on duty pretty much around the clock. Even the best servers and networks experience problems – very often. It isn’t possible to just “set it and forget it” for very long at all. There is absolutely no chance of that.
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!
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