Thread: Help needed regarding my own Web Server

I am living in Delhi and plan to keep a web server of my own for my websites.
To those:
a) Who want to suggest me "Don't go for it", I am going to...
b) Want to tell me "Will cost a lot", Thats what this topic is for...

I have the server, sufficient supply, I can manage it easily. The problem is all about brodaband.

I need a cheap, high speed and unlimited broadband connection. 2 MBPS will be great for me. As I check the MTNL website, 2 MBPS U?L is 9,000/- a month. Thats approx. 200$+/month... I can easily get a better server from some other areas in that price.

So any suggestions about what I can/I should do?

Plus if anyone did this before? How much electricity does this cost? Any ideas?

Thanks
born2hack

What exactly is your query? I see you have answered all your questions yourself.

If you still have any query please list out your questions so we can try and help you out.

why do so much??
just get a hosting package
u can get unlimited storage for just Rs399 a month

LOL
I read what he said in point a)...

i think this born2hack guy must have hacked himself

and can any one tel me what does LOL stadnds for?

LOL= Laughing out loud

No business venture should be made without:

- cost / benefit analysis
- ROI (Return on Investment) analysis
- Risk analysis and Risk Mitigation methods

Assuming MTNL is the cheapest, still Rs. 9000 pm is a large amount. If putting up personal web sites is what interests you, you could look for web hostinng providers such as host gator.

But if it is not too much confidential, if you could explain your purposes and aims more candidly, a number of useful suggestions may come up.

The questions:
So any suggestions about what I can/I should do?

Plus if anyone did this before? How much electricity does this cost? Any ideas?

I will add another:
I just need a the cheapest internet connection and at least 1 MBPS(U/L), which provider should I go with?

And its NOT a personal site. I mainly want the server to be on my side. And I plan to sell a few my friends hosting on that server, thats why I might buy cPanel/WHM.

I hope I made myself clear.

born2hack

Originally Posted by born2hack

The questions:
So any suggestions about what I can/I should do?

Plus if anyone did this before? How much electricity does this cost? Any ideas?

I will add another:
I just need a the cheapest internet connection and at least 1 MBPS(U/L), which provider should I go with?

And its NOT a personal site. I mainly want the server to be on my side. And I plan to sell a few my friends hosting on that server, thats why I might buy cPanel/WHM.

I hope I made myself clear.

born2hack

like Just4kix said no plan should be made with this factors in mind

- cost / benefit analysis
- ROI (Return on Investment) analysis
- Risk analysis and Risk Mitigation methods

you could normally take a hosting plan for urself!!!! decide what services is your website going to provide to the end user..... for example is your site going to contain only information or a lot of intraction from the users side as well which would be increasing the serverside load for your website. any kind off downloads or even flash movies, how goood is your data streaming mechanism going to be. who is going to be your target audience for example a website about "CCNA" would attract only people aspiring for carreer in networks it would not attract a normal surfer. these are just the starting things that u would need to keep in mind and plan!!!!

As far as the hardware is concernd you could take up a machine with a fairly good amount of ram!!! and processor speed lets 8 GB for a start would be ok i guess!!!!.

The best web server could be a linux box coz with it u can decide exactly wat services you want your server to run, primarily Apache server would be for your hosting, netfilter for your security routing, for internal load balancing., database services Mysql.....,,,........ what else..... proxy for your internal use as well.......... these are the basic things that i could think about... then you got to think about electricity maintainance as well... the major thing you would need to do is monitor the traffic to your website and then take an average hit on your website by which you could know the processor loads at different parts of the day and determine wether you need any upgrades as stuff... at this point a migration also comes into play... these are the starters ..... but dude you got a good thought !!!! try it out get hold of any linux OS learn it if you have good for you!!!!

Nothing is impossible... i have seen guys do this mostly in the US i guess bbb.rpmfind.com rpmfind - linux news and resources is one such site if iam not mistaken. i could be getting the sites name wrong but this site provides service of dowloading latest rpms !!!!

Whoa!! 2mbps line @ Rs 9k, that's a lot.

Originally Posted by relton

Whoa!! 2mbps line @ Rs 9k, that's a lot.

Didn't exactly understand what is your need. But I think, there is better servers with good rate in TheRackspace and ThePlanet and all. They are the top two leading server providers with good rate. If you are affordable a Rs. 9000 here. Then you will have to consider them.

you need a very reliable internet connection

personally i think tat only airtel comes close to tat......

Originally Posted by kamalian

Didn't exactly understand what is your need. But I think, there is better servers with good rate in TheRackspace and ThePlanet and all. They are the top two leading server providers with good rate. If you are affordable a Rs. 9000 here. Then you will have to consider them.

I was merely surprised at the rate, and not anything else.:stuart:

Originally Posted by born2hack

The questions:
So any suggestions about what I can/I should do?

Plus if anyone did this before? How much electricity does this cost? Any ideas?

I will add another:
I just need a the cheapest internet connection and at least 1 MBPS(U/L), which provider should I go with?

And its NOT a personal site. I mainly want the server to be on my side. And I plan to sell a few my friends hosting on that server, thats why I might buy cPanel/WHM.

I hope I made myself clear.

born2hack

You have made two posts till now on this forum and both of them are such that you kind of give an impression that you know everything about hosting... I would say you know jack **** about hosting and the problem with you is that you refuse to learn from others who are exprienced in this field.

I understand you want to sell hosting to your friends or may be increase your customer base a little bit more on the side as you go along..

Your approach is 100% idiotic (Iam not this blunt normally but I dont have any other words to describe this better)
You want to sell hosting and you want to start it up with a 1mbps line that too provided by an Indian isp where you can expect days and days of downtime if not months and thats something I can gurantee that you WILL have a lot of downtime... what would you do in that situation? You have to make sure that the isp allows hosting a server... which in India they dont except for one.

You can get reseller hosting with WHM/Cpanel included with a lot of space and good amount of bandwidth from some one like hostgator for a lot less then you would pay for a 1mbps connection.... This would save you a lot of money and will let you provide a good service to your customers as hostgator servers are at the planet data centre and they have an excelent network with almost 100% uptime which is something of highest importance to any webmaster... Can you imagine this forum hosted on a 1mbps line in India? what would I do if tata or reliance which ever isp I get the connection from doesnt attend my disconnection? what would be this site like if it remained out of reach for our members 3-4 days every month?


Get back to your little senses if you have any and drop this stupid idea of hosting a server at home here in India... I would understand if you were living in UK, USA, Canada or even Hongkong where you get excelent uptime from isps and a lot of them allow hosting servers from home but even then it would still be cheaper to start you rbusiness by getting reseller hosting from a bigger company to star with.

Why do you think all these thousands of hosting companies are in business? They would all go out of business if hosting sites from homes was feasable.

Jai Hind

PS: no offence intended

It is better that you get a hosting package instead of going for your own server unless for commercial reasons it is not worthwhile an adventure.

While I hear a lot of negative comments here, then I am actually doing what he is asking, crazy huh?

We have a set of applications that require low latency to India and does not take much bandwidth - only servers in India can give us the low latency of <100ms. Currently our setup is based on a set of business ADSL lines, each at 1Mbit/s up/down, from two different ADSL providers. We have 1) three SUN X4140 servers at our office, one running Linux which handles multiplexing the ADSL connections and two running our application in a failover setup; 2) an APC UPS together with a Honda generator for power-safety. We use DNS SRV in the protocol to handle balancing and when one provider is temporarily down. It HAS happened a few times that both providers have been down at the same time, luckily not more than our SLA can handle up to now.

The setup works very well, but, as I have been asking in another thread here on the forum, we are thinking to move to a datacenter, to have more flexible bandwidth management. But, we need a datacenter which is within few hours of travel from our office (Nellore), in case of some hardware problem with the servers.

I agree what others are saying: I would only recommend this kind of setup if you have a business case that can pay for it, a service that does not require traffic bursts (web-pages are usually a service that require traffic bursts), and a SLA (or users) that allows for some downtime. I think 9000INR/month is expensive for only 2Mbit/s (up/down?), even in India

Cheers,
Blomma

Originally Posted by blomma

While I hear a lot of negative comments here, then I am actually doing what he is asking, crazy huh?

We have a set of applications that require low latency to India and does not take much bandwidth - only servers in India can give us the low latency of <100ms. Currently our setup is based on a set of business ADSL lines, each at 1Mbit/s up/down, from two different ADSL providers. We have 1) three SUN X4140 servers at our office, one running Linux which handles multiplexing the ADSL connections and two running our application in a failover setup; 2) an APC UPS together with a Honda generator for power-safety. We use DNS SRV in the protocol to handle balancing and when one provider is temporarily down. It HAS happened a few times that both providers have been down at the same time, luckily not more than our SLA can handle up to now.

The setup works very well, but, as I have been asking in another thread here on the forum, we are thinking to move to a datacenter, to have more flexible bandwidth management. But, we need a datacenter which is within few hours of travel from our office (Nellore), in case of some hardware problem with the servers.

I agree what others are saying: I would only recommend this kind of setup if you have a business case that can pay for it, a service that does not require traffic bursts (web-pages are usually a service that require traffic bursts), and a SLA (or users) that allows for some downtime. I think 9000INR/month is expensive for only 2Mbit/s (up/down?), even in India

Cheers,
Blomma

This can be only done with Lease lines but in case of india forget about the Lease lines ISP are charging 5.5 lakhs to 8 Lakhs for 2 Mbps and 3.25 Lakhs for very 2 Mbps, that also only for 97% uptime only... i recive many quotes from TATA, Reliance, Bharti Airtel , BSNL , and many other also .

for our group compnies websites we have Blade servers in our office we planned to host our sites but when we see thats blady its not a good deal to host in-house so we moved to hosting provider.

This can be only done with Lease lines

I think you misunderstand, we are already doing this using multiple ADSL lines. (Ofcause, our protocol has support for handling this specific case, so its not a universal solution)

Cheers,
Blomma

Originally Posted by blomma

I think you misunderstand, we are already doing this using multiple ADSL lines. (Ofcause, our protocol has support for handling this specific case, so its not a universal solution)

Cheers,
Blomma

I think you are using network bonding, where different connection can be treat as one and having fail-overs safe. but this tech is only sutable for lite weight websites because adsl having 1/4 is upload only if you have 1 Mpbs then your upload is only 256 kbps only were as in webhosting should be 1:1 ratio bandwidth. if some is downloading some content then your website response will be effected becasue this we have already done before shifting to hosting provider we have tested all alternatives then only we take this step.

.....

I think you are using network bonding, where different connection can be treat as one and having fail-overs safe. but this tech is only sutable for lite weight websites because adsl having 1/4 is upload only if you have 1 Mpbs then your upload is only 256 kbps only were as in webhosting should be 1:1 ratio bandwidth. if some is downloading some content then your website response will be effected becasue this we have already done before shifting to hosting provider we have tested all alternatives then only we take this step.

1:1MBit/s connections are also there. ADSL does not need to be asymmetric in the bandwidth offered. Also there are traffic-shaping solutions available, that can prioritize burst-traffic, to help the problem to some degree. But, yes, I completely agree with you ... Just as I already said in my previous post:

I agree what others are saying: I would only recommend this kind of setup if you have a business case that can pay for it, a service that does not require traffic bursts (web-pages are usually a service that require traffic bursts),

We are not using bonding, that is a different concept, and requires ISP support for it (I don't know of any Indian ISPs supporting it?). Our service is not HTTP/Web based, it is a specific protocol based on UDP and DNS. For our service, a setup with multiple ADSL lines is acceptable, because the protocol is designed to handle it.

Cheers,
Blomma

Originally Posted by blomma

1:1MBit/s connections are also there. ADSL does not need to be asymmetric in the bandwidth offered. Also there are traffic-shaping solutions available, that can prioritize burst-traffic, to help the problem to some degree. But, yes, I completely agree with you ... Just as I already said in my previous post:



We are not using bonding, that is a different concept, and requires ISP support for it (I don't know of any Indian ISPs supporting it?). Our service is not HTTP/Web based, it is a specific protocol based on UDP and DNS. For our service, a setup with multiple ADSL lines is acceptable, because the protocol is designed to handle it.

Cheers,
Blomma

you are not hosting website content, then its ok becasue in most of the UDP DNS is post packet to name resolving so it will not consume were as in web content its bandwidth consuming.

You should look at hosting in a DataCenter if you want to run it 24x7 - you need clean and continuous power , cooling , bandwidth ... broadband is NOT reliable.

Originally Posted by blomma

We are not using bonding, that is a different concept, and requires ISP support for it (I don't know of any Indian ISPs supporting it?). Our service is not HTTP/Web based, it is a specific protocol based on UDP and DNS. For our service, a setup with multiple ADSL lines is acceptable, because the protocol is designed to handle it.

VRRP in linux handles redundancy real well. There's also a whole lot many ways in which you can use multiple uplinks together - not bonding
Routing for multiple uplinks
Routing for multiple uplinks/providers