Home Internet Webhosting with Failover?

[RaddyKewl]

I run four low traffic websites. Three are running Wordpress, one is running Yourls. They’re  for my business portfolio, personal blog, Twitch streaming, and a URL shortener. I get such little traffic and I don’t expect it to go up any time in the near future. I can’t justify paying a few hundred dollars a year on hosting, for such little use. I know there’s free hosting out there, but many ISPs block those hosts at the DNS level for spam and abuse violations.

 

I’m currently on Comcast Internet 600Mbps , 20Mbps . The speed is decent, but I lose connection a couple of times per day. I recently purchased a Synology router with load balancing and fail over, and I intend to add AT&T DSL to make my connection more reliable. Unfortunately there are no fiber-to-the-home options in my area.

 

I have found a mini workstation (similar to the corporate computer provided by my employer) that should be more than powerful enough to run my four sites.

 

HP Elitedesk 800 G3 Mini Business Desktop (Intel Quad Core i5-6500T, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 512GB SSD) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086RF1SLK/

 

I currently have residential internet with Comcast, and my IP has been the same for years (even after several modem power cycles). I might even bump it up to a business account, just in case they block ports or traffic, and so I don’t run afoul of their terms and conditions.

 

I don’t know how IPs are handled with AT&T, but I would likely get a business account with them as well.

 

Since my router supports load balancing and fail over, is there a way to setup my home internet server to use both connections (mainly for the fail over aspect) to maintain uptime on my websites.

 

I’m currently on Dreamhost, and I’m actually quite impressed with them. They have automated updates for all of my sites. They handle automated renewals of SSL with Let’s Encrypt. I would kind of like to have that level of ease of use, after the initial setup. Basically I want a Ron Popeil webhost. Set it and forget it. (Hoping I’m not aging myself with that reference.)

 

To accomplish all of the above, what direction should I be heading?

What OS?

What webserver software?

If load balancing a website is possible, what terminology and software should I be researching?

Any other advice?

Any fatal flaws in my logic?

 

I’m confident I could eventually do all of the setup by following various tutorials. But I’m not into doing a lot of tedious work, so I’d consider hiring someone to do that for me. Though I’m not ready to move forward on that right away. This is a longterm plan, I’m just researching right now.

[mariushm]

A good shared hosting account is 5-10$ a month. 

 

Problem with home internet connections is chance of IP address changing often, and you can't have a mail server and send emails to people (as "home-user" IP addresses are added in blocklists and filters and emails would be rejected), and you may have in the terms of service some lines about not being allowed to host websites...

And... you would need a computer run 24/7 to host those websites, costing you 1-2$ a month at minimum (ex 30w x 24h x 31 days = 22320 watts = 22 kWh x 0.1$ per kWh (optimist) = 2$

 

To actually host, you'd just need apache or nginx or some other web server, a database server (maria db is the open fork of mysql), php ... these can run on linux or windows then you'd need to point the dns entry for the domains you have to your IP address, and configure port forwarding on your router (ex anything coming to port 80 and 443 is routed to your server's local IP address.

As mail alternative, you could resort to a service like sendgrid or other more competitive ones (some give you let's say 50-100 free emails a day or 1000 free emails a month or something like that. which may be enough for subscribe ,  forgot/recover password emails features of your websites. basically, you sign up with such service and instead of using the mail server provided by dreamhost or your own, you use that service's API to send emails with their email servers.

 

 

[Needfuldoer]

Even if the hardware was free, you could get shared web hosting or a VPS from a service like DigitalOcean for far less than the monthly cost of DSL.

 

Your use case might even fit inside the 'free forever' tier on Oracle Cloud.

[RaddyKewl]

42 minutes ago, mariushm said:

A good shared hosting account is 5-10$ a month. 

 

Problem with home internet connections is chance of IP address changing often, and you can't have a mail server and send emails to people (as "home-user" IP addresses are added in blocklists and filters and emails would be rejected), and you may have in the terms of service some lines about not being allowed to host websites...

I was planning to upgrade to business internet for this (as stated in my initial post). Electricity costs are miniscule. 

 

45 minutes ago, mariushm said:

To actually host, you'd just need apache or nginx or some other web server, a database server (maria db is the open fork of mysql), php ... these can run on linux or windows then you'd need to point the dns entry for the domains you have to your IP address, and configure port forwarding on your router (ex anything coming to port 80 and 443 is routed to your server's local IP address.

Is it possible to point the DNS entries to both IP addresses? If not, is there software I can run similar to Dynamic DNS that would somehow make it link to both as a failover option?

 

48 minutes ago, mariushm said:

As mail alternative, you could resort to a service like sendgrid or other more competitive ones (some give you let's say 50-100 free emails a day or 1000 free emails a month or something like that. which may be enough for subscribe ,  forgot/recover password emails features of your websites. basically, you sign up with such service and instead of using the mail server provided by dreamhost or your own, you use that service's API to send emails with their email servers.

For this, I'm currently on Google's G Suite for my email, but I'll likely drop them since they're plan to start charging me for the service. I use my standard GMail account for most of my email anyway.

 

40 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

Even if the hardware was free, you could get shared web hosting or a VPS from a service like DigitalOcean for far less than the monthly cost of DSL.

 

Your use case might even fit inside the 'free forever' tier on Oracle Cloud.

Do these services allow me to use my own domains and allow SSL?

I'm already planning to get the DSL for failover, since my current internet is unreliable. It constantly goes down while I'm working and when I wanna relax and watch TV. I would just switch to DSL, but it's much slower than cable when it's working. I also plan to setup a home VPN sometime in the future, so I can access my network remotely, and eventually to allow future employees or contractors to access my servers from their homes. Since I'm already getting the extra connection, I might as well use the connections for webhosting as well. It'll save me money in the long run.

[Mortenrb]

There's a couple of flaws in your plan.

The idea is good, but your ISP might have terms that disallow such activity on a private plan, and on a business plan you might get other limitations, such as bandwidth limitation and a higher monthly cost. (plus, probably insane fees if you use more than your allocated bandwidth)

A shared host often also has protections, such as DDOS protection, backups in the case of faulty hardware, uptime guarantee.

As others has stated, you also have the cost of electricity, hardware maintenance, software maintenance.

 

In the long run, a shared host or even a low-tier VPS from DigitalOcean or Linode might fit your needs perfectly. (easy to setup multiple websites with let's encrypt on a single VPS, and some shared webhosting solutions allows multiple domains on a single account)

Also, multiple IP's to one domain is a okay technique for redundancy, but it doesn't actually check whether or not the IP is offline, and thus clients might connect through the service that is offline. (check Round-robin DNS)

 

Just read your last reply: Zoho has a solution for a custom domain, for free.

Edited February 23, 2022 by Mortenrb
Zoho

[RaddyKewl]

I'm already using a free Cloudflare plan for cacheing and DDOS protection. It looks like they offer that round robin DNS service. Their site mentions some advanced services can detect when servers are down, and I assume they're referring to their own services.

 

https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/glossary/round-robin-dns/

[Needfuldoer]

1 hour ago, RaddyKewl said:

Do these services allow me to use my own domains and allow SSL?

But of course! You're just renting a virtual machine in a datacenter. You usually get at least one public IP address to work with, too.

 

As long as you don't try to hack their network, run a spam factory, or distribute illegal materials, the VM you rent is yours to do with as you please.