What the *** is your problem??

Posted: Thu May 13, 2004 1:34 am (19 years, 11 months ago)

Let me make a few points that I have not seen in this thread. And sorry for bringing and old thead back to life but I hope to shed some light for you that may help you from having problems in the future.

First, it is a great idea to get into hosting for fun and for profit as it can be both. Now for some info that I know to be true because I did have a small server out of my house just for business FTP reasons.

1st- Power. If you have a power flash in your area your server may not reboot. If the power flashed for just a second you system may come right back but if it goes down for a few minutes most likely your computer will not turn itself back on.

2nd- Email. All of the big boys (AOL, MSN, Earthlink, RoadRunner, Comcast, and many many more) will not deliver email that is sent from your server. They all do a dns lookup on incoming email to see if it is coming from a "personal" cable or dls connection. In order to have your email delivered you have to pay for business class service that legally allows you to host services on your connection.

3rd- Ports. Most cable/dsl ISPs will start blocking your email, web, and ftp ports if they see that they are being used. You can do work arounds to keep running but for your paying customer to have to change his pop settings everything another port gets blocked on your computer is not a good thing. And trust me, your ISP has it somewhere that you cannot host services and they will start blocking your ports.

4th- Connection speed. That has been discussed here. 1 person checking and downloading an email attachment could make it so that a second user trying to access the sites that you are hosting to be very very slow. This may actually hurt your music store owners business. Also, if you are surfing the internet or playing an online game or anything like that you will be killing any speeds that you do have.

You can still have fun and make money with a small reseller account. To get your home computer able to host properly you would need to spend about $20 to $50 more per month to get the cheapest business class service available (and many times this is slower thatn your personal connection). You should also be buying at least 1 dedicated IP address. Usually the cost for this is $25/month for the first one and special modem they give you.

That is at least $45/month. you can buy a lot of a reseller account and have just about as much fun with hosting.

Good luck with your desicions and building your customer base with whatever you chose to do.