Web Hosting Server

[Khan, Faraz]

Hi Linus Tech team

 

I have recently started to watch your youtube videos and they are very good. 

 

Me(Electronics Engineer) and my cousin( Software Engineer) are thinking to have our own web hosting server in my home. And since i don't know anything about server i like to prefer asking you before i get started. My cousin promised me that he will give me 4 websites every month which can be both static or dynamic. 

 

Here in my country other hosting servers are offering $37/year for unlimited data block.

 

So I would like to ask you what server specs i may choose. And for startups i would not like to get huge on my budget since my pocket is very small. ?

[SPAS-ID]

what website are you going to make ? Data Hosting/Forum/Stuff, i recommend getting 8/16GB of RAM as a startup since there's not so much visitor, and HDD as Storage

[.:MARK:.]

Hardware doesn't really matter that much, you can scale out webhosting quite easily. So if the hardware you have is not enough, just get more

But I would definitely look into the software side of things more,

things like Virtualisation, and setting up reverse proxies and proper firewall configuration.

You may also need to learn how to automate processes to manage customer servers easily. Look into security and IDS(Intrusion Detection Systems).

When you have a firm understanding of all of those things, you can build a badass scalable webhosting company.

[Mikensan]

I agree with @.:MARK:. - You can use almost any hardware manufactured since 2010 to host the website initially as your client base is going to be fairly small. As money comes in, save it and roll it in to newer hardware.

 

You'll also want to chose what you're going to use to actually host the webserver. I would suggest Apache which can run in either Windows or Linux and has a ton of support when you google your problems. Other options are IIS (Microsoft) or Tomcat.

 

I agree again, you'll also want to get familiar with IDS/IPS technology since majority of attackers look for startup hosting companies expecting weaker security. You can start off with something like pfSense with the Suricata or Snort package.

 

**Also, you may want to check with your ISP. In the US, most if not all ISPs do not allow hosting on consumer internet packages.

*** If your IP is not static, you also want some sort of dynamic DNS solution like no-ip.com