To Serve or Not To Serve
 

Hi everyone, I am having a difficult time determining if I should attempt to serve my own webpage again or continue with a paid hosting company. I own my domain and had been serving the site from a gentoo box in a closet with the help of dyndns. Didn't really have any problems with it except for one which I will mention later. But a tornado tore through my town and damaged that particular computer. I then set up a paid account through Omnis to host the site while repairing the box.

I now have the box set back up and its just about ready to take over hosting again but I'm starting to wonder if I'm better off keeping it on a paid provider. I liked being able to access any of my linux computers from any internet terminal with ssh, I liked not having to wait on an email back from the provider to find out if they have XXX configured so a webapp would work correctly. I guess my two biggest concerns on hosting it myself is (a)Will it put a real noticible drain on my bandwith (I use 3Mbps(Down)/512Kbps(Up) DSL). My site is just a small hobby site with negligable traffic. (b)Setting up Outbound mail, I dont need it to be a full-fledged mail server, just be able to send out an email if someone fills out a comment form, wants to contact me, etc... Postfix/Qmail/Etc... are sooooo overkill. I just need somthing that can send through an SMTP server like any email client program can.


I know its ultimatly my choice on self-serve or continue through Omnis, I'm just looking for a little input.

Hi.

Yeah, host it yourself. If traffic is negligable, then so will the impact on your bandwidth be. Having full control of the box is always handy.

If you're looking for a simple SMTP mailer, have a look at 'msmtp'. The features it implements (SMTP sending, and not much else) are compatible with Sendmail's syntax, and it's nice and simple to configure (as in 3 lines in a text file).

Dave

I would say host yourself. However if you want to stick with paid I recomed pessetto.net because you have SSH access on the account which will alow you to install packages that don't require you to be root. And If you need someting installed and its open-source or has a GPL they will install it for you so you don't have to worry if it is supported or not.

Check with your ISP... many ISPs block port 25 which would prevent you from running an SMTP server.