More information: I'm getting a new laptop soon (yay!) and I was thinking of using the old box as a server for a small site that is accessed mostly by me and my family and uses very little bandwidth. I have to contact my service provider first to see if this is even something I'm allowed to do - which it probably won't be because I'm on a residential account. If it is though, is this something feasible or reasonable? Or should I just stick with the hosting the site somewhere else?

yes, it's possible; i do it.

i run (suse) linux and manage the dynamic name with dyndns.org. i didn't ask my provider first.

whether you consider it hard or no depends on how much experience you have with linux, i guess. with a distro like recent suse, getting a basic server running, with a firewall, is mainly clicking in the right places, so i would say you should be able to do it, from your self description.

do you have any specific questions?

Don't ask your ISP. Just do it. There's very little difference between hosting a small friends and family server and simply sending out files on AIM or as email attachments.

Warning: Because the terms of service in regards to running non-commercial web servers are pretty toothles, and because your ISP actually, usually does want to keep your business as a download-only consumer sheep, your ISP may respond with one or both of the following actions.

They may block inbound port 80 requests, which is the default port for HTTP requests, basically rendering your server invisible to DNS redirects from your DNS provider (or even from direct IP based requests, such as to http://127.0.0.1/index.html, or whatever your IP is, etc. Which is what your DNS would point to, anyway.)

To solve this you'd end up using port forwarding, so you configure your web server (say, Apache) to serve up HTML docs in response to HTTP requests coming in to, say, port 8080 instead of port 80. So, your HTTP DNS URL, say http://yourdomainhere.com/ ends up resolving as http://127.0.0.1:8080/ where the numbers after the colon indicate the port number.

This gets a bit trickier, but a dynamic dns service like dyndns should be able to handle it.

Punitive retribution scenario number two is that they may cap your bandwidth rate on either the up/outbound leg, or even on the down/inbound leg of your service, ostensibly to prevent your server and activity from bogging down their servers and switches that connect you to the rest of the net, or to attempt to keep you from over-saturating the local shared loop of a cable modem network.

If they cap your bandwidth in either direction to something unusable or annoyingly below what you're actually paying as advertised in your contract, call them up and bitch until they remove the caps. If they don't remove them, attempt to change service to a new ISP, like Speakeasy or another DSL service, where they tend to not care about people running hobby/personal servers at home.

andrew cooke: I have no experience with linux although I have always been interested in learning so this might be a good opportunity to try it out. Even if I manage to mess up something beyond repair it won't matter too much as this old box isn't really worth anything. As for any specific questions: hmmm. Well mostly I just wanted to make sure it was something worth trying. I'm not paying a whole lot for hosting right now but I thought since the old PC would just be sitting around gathering dust otherwise I might try and save a few bucks a month.

loquacious: If I get the old box up and running with linux I may just go ahead and try it.

LeeJay, are you on DSL or cable? If DSL, you may be able to get a static IP from your provider. You also probably have the option of changing providers to one who has terms you like better than the one you have.

If you have cable, the situation is much worse. They almost certainly won't give you a static IP, they may be quite hostile to running servers, and your upload speed will be low. (Remember that when you're hosting, your upload speed is the total download speed available to everyone who visits your site.) It would help to know who your provider is.

Oh, and definitely go with Linux or FreeBSD if you're going to dedicate a computer to this. If you have a windows-based server on the open internet it will get attacked pretty much all day long, and will take far more time and attention than you'd want to spend on keeping it from getting hacked. And you won't necessarily know when it has been hacked and is happily spewing spam on somebody else's behalf.

I have cable, George_Spiggott, unfortunately. Millenium Digital. So I might just say to hell with it and keep the site hosted where it is.

Here's a link to their terms of service. Typically for cable, they stipulate no home servers:

Customer will not use, nor allow others to use, Customer’s home computer or home network as a web server, FTP server, file server or game server or to run any other server applications.

This isn't unusual and some people run servers anyway, and get away with it because the cable companies don't have any staff actually monitoring this sort of thing. But they also say that they will block ports at their discretion.

The thing about cable is that there's a very limited amount of upstream bandwidth available for a given area. DSL tends to be more relaxed about this sort of thing because you have dedicated bandwidth between your home and the central office: nobody else is on that copper pair.

[stage left, what looked like a pile of seaweed and driftwood, stirs, coughs, a face begins to take shape] pfhlawgh,, chukkas,... Some one around here is asking about hosting their own site?!?. You MUST have a dedicated IP, cable will not work. I have used many ISPs, my current is Speakeasy. They can provide what you need and most importantly their customer service is very good.

Do not use IIs, the LAMP will see you through.

Good luck.

BZZzzzzZZzzzzzz.. Brp...zZz

I do it. It's easy.

It would not have been "easy" for me in '99, when I switched to Linux. For the first month, the learning curve sucked. After that, I was able to do everything I wanted.

The cool think about Unix in general is that you can see for yourself that the software that runs the core of the internet is not some crazy black-magic stuff. It's mostly free, and fairly accessible stuff that anybody can figure out, if they are willing to learn.