Running a Home Web Server on a Budget
By Jeff Johnston
Running a web server from your home is not necessarily difficult or expensive. In order to run a home web server you need a fairly high-speed connection, a Domain name, a computer, an operating system, and an HTTP server. Of course anything you wish to add beyond that is up to you.
The first item, a high-speed connection, is probably going to be your highest cost. DSL will get you the most bandwidth for your buck though, and it is available in almost all North American markets now. You will have to ensure that your Internet Service Provider (ISP) knows that you intend to run a web server from your home so that your can get a dedicated IP, or at least have them set up their DNS to point your Domain Name to your computer. Generally speaking a dedicated IP is an additional price, but when dealing with accounts that are designed for servers it may not be.
Domain names are easy to acquire and not overly expensive, Go Daddy Software has what I believe is the cheapest domain name registration fees on the Internet. Fees on Go Daddy range from $7 - $10/year. But having a domain name is technically optional since there are many ways around having to pay that yearly fee. You could use only your IP address, but you would have to ensure that your ISP gives you a dedicated IP address so you can always have the same address. The other option is to use a sub-domain, your ISP could provide you with a sub-domain i.e. www.yourname.ispname.com, or if you know someone who owns a domain name and is willing to set up DNS for a sub-domain for you your could lower your costs considerably.
Contrary to popular opinion it does not take a lot of power to run a web server. Your primary concern is the minimum requirements of the platform you choose. You can use an old 486 and still get good performance on a Linux machine running an Apache HTTP Server. Most Linux distributions (commonly referred to as "flavors") recommend at least a Pentium processor with 64 Meg RAM.
Of course you can run a web server on pretty much any platform from Windows 95 and up. The question is do you really want to run a web server on Windows 95. Your best bet is a Unix or Linux platform. You get much better stability for a much lower cost. Linux is Open source, so your could easily enough find a free version. There are several flavors of both Linux and Unix that come pre-bundled with all the software you will need to run a web server out of your home.
There are a variety of web server packages available that range in price from "Oh my god you must be kidding" to free. Apache is one of the best-known web servers on the market, and guess what, it is one of the free ones. According to the October 2003 Netcraft Web Server survey, more than 64% of web sites on the Internet are hosted on Apache servers. Apache is highly recommended it is fairly simple to set up, and highly configurable. The only negative thing that can be said about Apache is it is not the easiest software to tweak. Apache is most commonly run on UNIX or Linux servers, while there are Win32 ports Apache was designed for UNIX so it works best on UNIX based servers, since Linux is at its core a UNIX based platform.
So if you went with a free version of Linux your only costs would be your ISP fees, and your hardware. With this simple and cheap set up you can run a pretty sophisticated web service system host as many domain names as you wish, which in the end means that you could offset some of your ISP fees by hosting some other sites and charging a fee. Of course if you would want to be aware that any site you host takes away from your bandwidth and system resources so you would not want to spread yourself too thin.