Webserver - anyone know how to?

[waynehartwig]

I didn't know where to put this, and it is 4x4 related, kinda... It runs a 4x4 website

Anyway, I'm getting tired of not being able to control my hosting company and want to host AllJeep.com from home. Over the past year with them, there have been two episodes where the website was having problems and they are unavailable. The last time I went out and bought all of the server stuff (tower, 3.6 gig P4, 4 GIG ram, 2mb cache, 5-300 gig hd's (RAID 5), etc). And they resolved the problem so I never put it up. I've just been using it as my personal computer. Well, they are at it again, so I want to switch!

I have a dedicated loop DSL line coming in this week, so there is your connection...AllJeep.com has a dedicated IP and a SSL certificate that would need to be installed as well. I think I also want it to be ran on Linux, not Windows.

I need someone to tell me what else I need so I can obtain it, then I need you to put it up for me! I'll pay handsomely for this service!! I was thinking a shopping spree?

I need someone that has done this before and can do it in their sleep. I don't want any problems! When I'm not having any problems with the website, I see over 60k hits a day, so downtime is also a concern.

Anyone up for this challenge?

 

[Herzog]

Moved to chit-chat.

You won't be able to keep your existing IP for the site if you move the server to your house. You will need a new static IP on your DSL line at your house. If you can, see if they have an upgrade package to allow more upstream traffic on your line... which will help especially running a web server with 60k hits/day from home.

All of your SSL certificate (depending how it has been implemented) will just need some minor changes.

As for linux... I favor RedHat, but they don't support any versions below their enterprise edition now, which is no longer free. So maybe Fedora (from redhat) will be a good distro for you. http://fedora.redhat.com/ For the webserver, you can choose to install a gui or you can run it from command line.

Then I would recommend running Apache for your http server. http://www.apache.org

I'm sure there are several others on this forum who will chime in with more opinions and facts.

 

[Caleb]

Moved to chit-chat.

You won't be able to keep your existing IP for the site if you move the server to your house. You will need a new static IP on your DSL line at your house. If you can, see if they have an upgrade package to allow more upstream traffic on your line... which will help especially running a web server with 60k hits/day from home.

All of your SSL certificate (depending how it has been implemented) will just need some minor changes.

As for linux... I favor RedHat, but they don't support any versions below their enterprise edition now, which is no longer free. So maybe Fedora (from redhat) will be a good distro for you. http://fedora.redhat.com/ For the webserver, you can choose to install a gui or you can run it from command line.

Then I would recommend running Apache for your http server. http://www.apache.org

I'm sure there are several others on this forum who will chime in with more opinions and facts.

what he said...I run Fedora for my server at home with Apache for my http server. Fedora is nice cause its so widely supported. There are a bunch of forums dedicated specifically to it, which you likely wont find for any other distro. A big thing that Shane mentioned is to get the fastest upload you can. Your upload speed is what everyone elses download speed will be for your site.

Also, this may seem obvious but I know a lot of people make this mistake. Download your site and all your files before cancelling with your current hosting company

The advantage to having a company host it for you is most (good) companies have redundancy not only on the drive but also on the lines in and out and on the servers. Even though you may have your info redundant, if you loose a MB or something that shuts your machine down (power outage)...your site is now down and there's nothing you can do about it. If you really are seeing 60K hits a day then I would sit down and really weigh the plusses versus the minuses. If you are looking at other hosting companies, check out www.powweb.com...I am sure they have everything you will need. I have been using them for a couple years now and have nothing but good to say about them. My site is never down, they guarantee 99.9% uptime but it is higher than that. I have a third party that monitors my site and in the last couple years my site has only been down a couple times (like 4-5) and they were all for only a matter of seconds and 2 or 3 were secheduled downtime for maintainence.

Good luck on your choice, just be sure to consider all things.

 

[Meat_]

I would never host a business site on a home connection. It's not fast enough, unless you get on Utopia or at least a T1.... and no even a dsl connection with 1.5 up is NOT equal to a T1.

btw, T1 = $500/month minimum

 

[Rickomatic]

what he said...I run Fedora for my server at home with Apache for my http server. Fedora is nice cause its so widely supported. There are a bunch of forums dedicated specifically to it, which you likely wont find for any other distro. A big thing that Shane mentioned is to get the fastest upload you can. Your upload speed is what everyone elses download speed will be for your site.

Also, this may seem obvious but I know a lot of people make this mistake. Download your site and all your files before cancelling with your current hosting company

The advantage to having a company host it for you is most (good) companies have redundancy not only on the drive but also on the lines in and out and on the servers. Even though you may have your info redundant, if you loose a MB or something that shuts your machine down (power outage)...your site is now down and there's nothing you can do about it. If you really are seeing 60K hits a day then I would sit down and really weigh the plusses versus the minuses. If you are looking at other hosting companies, check out www.powweb.com ...I am sure they have everything you will need. I have been using them for a couple years now and have nothing but good to say about them. My site is never down, they guarantee 99.9% uptime but it is higher than that. I have a third party that monitors my site and in the last couple years my site has only been down a couple times (like 4-5) and they were all for only a matter of seconds and 2 or 3 were secheduled downtime for maintainence.

Good luck on your choice, just be sure to consider all things.

I will second www.powweb.com. They host five of my sites and the one time they had a problem was when they had a DNS server go down, and I couldn't hit my www server. I could still hit the site if I just typed in the http://whatever.com. They gave me an extra six months service for the one day the site was down.

 

[Pathos]

If you really are worried about downtime then hosting it yourself on a DSL is not the best idea. The primary concern is the throughput. your DSL would have to be dedicated to the site and even then I have doubts it could keep up with 60k hits per day to a commerce site (what is your peek and average kb/s now? or the average page size). Second concern would be a power outage in your area would take down your site, which could be reduced by having enough battery backup to cover a couple of hours of runtime (this = $$$$$$).

Another concern would be attack attempts, Being on a DSL you will atleast be seing plenty o port scans and more than a few scripted attempts aimed at various services (tons of the O so popular IIS worms will be knocking). As long as you keep up with security patches and kill any un-needed services you should be ok.

Apache on Linux or xBSD should easily handle the load that a DSL could toss at it.

The SSL key/cert is pretty much copy it over to the newbox and tell the webserver where to find it.

You'll need to find a peer for your DNS as your previous provider more than likely will not be doing it anymore. 1 DNS on premiss and atleast 1 on a completly different network / location is a good rule.

hehe a lot o crap just to say It COULD be possible to host it yourself but there are plenty o questions that would need answered first.

 

[Meat_]

The simple answer is... Hosting at home will cost you a lot more to get a far inferior website.

 

[waynehartwig]

First, I realize the cost involved in hosting the website myself. But it is the only way I can be sure to have full control over the website. The only way I can be sure of it's status. Downtime costs me money in lost sales and traffic. Too much downtime and I lose customers and even more money. To me hosting the website myself will be priceless.

As for changing hosting companies, that is definately possible. However, I don't want to be bouncing from company to company. That costs money as well, since most don't offer refunds. Plus, this is very time intensive and again, my website will be down while I move it and unstable while the 'bugs' get worked out. Plus, I've heard tons of horror stories from people that have gone through several hosting companies and all that entails.

As for the DSL speed, a dedicated loop is very fast. A 1.5 mb dedicated loop is much faster than a home 1.5 mb. But I do realize I need a high upload speed. My current connection is 786k upload, and I intend on monitoring it and if I see that it's not sufficient, then I can always upgrade. I can go as high as 1.5 both directions, if need be. Most people can only download at around 3-400k from the web anyway. Since I'm not hosting files, I don't see this to be a problem. I'm only serving web pages, for the most part.

As for the UPS, I already purchased a large one that will keep my server, modem, hub, etc. up for about an hour if the power goes out. After I begin hosting my own site, I will upgrade this to a larger one just to be on the safe side. To date (over the past year) the power has only gone out once to even need the UPS and it didn't drain the battery, even though I have two complete computer systems running on it. One of which is this server I built.

As for software, I already have Shrike (Linux 9), MySql, PHP, Apache, Perl... I think that's all? I just need someone to put it together and get it running

 

[Meat_]

First, I realize the cost involved in hosting the website myself. But it is the only way I can be sure to have full control over the website. The only way I can be sure of it's status. Downtime costs me money in lost sales and traffic. Too much downtime and I lose customers and even more money. To me hosting the website myself will be priceless...

That's the thing though, hosting at home will be LESS reliable, you just need to pay a bit more for a better server farm. DSL is not enough for a server with any traffic to speak of. Most server farms are running on DS3 ~ OC48 (45 Mbps ~ 2.45 Gbps). Pay for a company with redundancy and bail over.

 

[waynehartwig]

That's the thing though, hosting at home will be LESS reliable, you just need to pay a bit more for a better server farm. DSL is not enough for a server with any traffic to speak of. Most server farms are running on DS3 ~ OC48 (45 Mbps ~ 2.45 Gbps). Pay for a company with redundancy and bail over.

Where does it stop? How much should I pay for this before I get reliable service?? $10 a month? $60? $300? I've talked to people that pay ~$100 a month and have heard their problems with thier hosting companies. I'm currently with a company that has all of the items you speak of. Their servers are in the same building as the giants.

The hosting world is not perfect and when the darn thing goes down, I have absolutely no control over it or how long it is down. This is no longer acceptable for me.

Back to the original question, who can set this up for me?

 

[Caleb]

Where does it stop? How much should I pay for this before I get reliable service?? $10 a month? $60? $300? I've talked to people that pay ~$100 a month and have heard their problems with thier hosting companies. I'm currently with a company that has all of the items you speak of. Their servers are in the same building as the giants.

The hosting world is not perfect and when the darn thing goes down, I have absolutely no control over it or how long it is down. This is no longer acceptable for me.

Back to the original question, who can set this up for me?

good luck, you obviously have your mind set on hosting it yourself. IMO, you are crazy!!! For a site with that kind of traffic you should most deffinitely either pay for hosting (like I mentioned before, powweb.com has been SUPER reliable for me over the past couple years) or co-locate. 1.5mbs is so little bandwidth that its kind of funny (that is if you are truely seeing 60,000 hits per day consistently). The limitations on most peoples downloads nowadays is the server you're pulling from (being most people have broadband of some sort). So saying people can only pull 300-400 is not true. If you host it yourself and it goes down, you still will ahve no control over it cause the things that will bring it down are things like power outages (how can you control that???) or hardware failure (it would suck to have some thing fail on a weekend or at night and your site is down the entire weekend). I think you were just with a crappy host. I know most companies do not host their own sites at their location if they are seeing much traffic or their business depends on it. Being your business is 95% internet based (I'm sure you do some business over the phone, right?) taking on that risk can potentially be a HUGE loss in sales.

once again, Good Luck

BTW, I would go with a more common version of Linux. I am pretty familiar with Linux and have never heard of Shrike. Getting assistance for specific problems will prove to be a PITA.

 

[Spork]

Shrike was Redhat 9s codename.

I don't think redhat is doing security updates anymore so if I were doing it I would probably go with http://fedora.redhat.com/ just so I am on something current.

I'm in the give it a shot and see what happens wagon. If nothing else it helps you know what is involved in hosting it.

If you do end up hosting I would check out http://www.cisecurity.org/ the benchmark is pretty good for helping you find holes in your system.

 

[Caleb]

I'm in the give it a shot and see what happens wagon. If nothing else it helps you know what is involved in hosting it.

If you do end up hosting I would check out http://www.cisecurity.org/ the benchmark is pretty good for helping you find holes in your system.

I personally wouldn't chance something that is your income for your family. Host a personal website first, grow it some, even host a mirror of your site but just to jump in feet first with the potential to loose a lot is a big step...especially when you dont even know how to set it up yourself. IMO, you have even less control if you were to host it yourself
I'm done now

btw, you may be able find someone on the Salt Lake Linux User group email list that would want to do this for you. You would have to subscribe to the email list though, www.sllug.org

 

[waynehartwig]

I am he&& bent on doing it myself. The topic is that I need someone to setup a webserver, not what do you think of this idea. Don't take it wrong, I APPRECIATE all of the comments and advice!

Looking at my server stats, I average 798 hits per hour with a 5,006 max. My transfer rate is about 3 meg per day. With those numbers I really don't see how a 384k pipe would see any trouble? I serve webpages, not files. Most of my webpages are text. I did just notice that my pictures are huge though ~50k each. So if you open a page in the catalog, you could potentially be opening a max of 20 at once, if there are 20 pictures on that one page.

Shrike is the new version of Linux, version 9. I briefly installed it on my laptop the last time my host screwed up. I had already started the server install process on my laptop while I was waiting on the server parts. I was that serious about dumping them back then.

As for co-locating it, I might... A friend said he would host a mirror. If this works, I can always get another server and another DSL line and have it replicated and redundant. Most hardware failures happen when you power them on, not while in use. My power has never gone out longer than 5-10 minutes here over the past year. So I doubt that once I start hosting it myself, it will start going out every other weekend for 2-3 hours. I bet the odds of it happening are higher than my current host going down.

Hell, who knows, maybe I'll start hosting it myself and I'll realize the hard work it takes to do it, and I'll appreciate that my host only made my site unreliable for ~40 hours over the past year.

 

[waynehartwig]

AllJeep.com doesn't support my family. My wife and I both have full time jobs. She works in the R&D lab at ARUP and I work for Unisys doing on site hardware support.

However, I am looking for a building to take AllJeep.com to a retail level....

 

[waynehartwig]

Actually, I was thinking about it..and even if it did, I would still want to host it myself. However, I would be even more hell bent on doing it myself, and I woudl have even more invested to do it right.

 

[Rusted]

Have you concidered renting space in a hosting center? One that I know of that I would highly recoment is Consonus. Their are other similar places around town, that is just one we have used. Not sure what they do for you "small guys" with only one server, but I bet they can help you. They cator to many of the larger companies. Normally a company would pay for a complete 6' rack. In your case you maybe able to share a rack with several companies. Just install your own server, Consonus can provide you with redundant T3 or great lines, they take care of security, the building are earthquake tollerant, use generators, and ups. If you want to take that route I can get you a contact to ask more questions to.

 

[waynehartwig]

Have you concidered renting space in a hosting center? One that I know of that I would highly recoment is Consonus. Their are other similar places around town, that is just one we have used. Not sure what they do for you "small guys" with only one server, but I bet they can help you. They cator to many of the larger companies. Normally a company would pay for a complete 6' rack. In your case you maybe able to share a rack with several companies. Just install your own server, Consonus can provide you with redundant T3 or great lines, they take care of security, the building are earthquake tollerant, use generators, and ups. If you want to take that route I can get you a contact to ask more questions to.

That might be an option, but to me that is nothing more than having someone else host it for you. Still have limited control over it. But then you would have a dedicated server.... To my knowledge, I'm currently sharing a server with another website. I know who it is, I refferred him He's VERY happy with them!!!!

 

[Meat_]

so...
50KB x 20 images = a shade under 1MB add in the other overhead of the web page, comunications back and forth you are over 1MB per hit

798 average... 13 hits a minute.... 13~14MB a minute average = 112Mb/minute = 1.8Mb/second

Now that is your average, you have to take your maximum and then add some saftey margin to it..... you still want to host it on a DSL line?

 

[Rusted]

Well one option would be to on a shared server, and you are right that would not be much different than what you have now. But my original thaught was for you to mount your own server in a rack. You then have full control and full responsibility as well. The company will supply you with a rack, electricity, and a network connection to the internet. From there it is all up to you.