Hello

I own a couple of domains and their respective web sites.
Their contents is small enough that I'd like to stop paying for hosting, and move the two sites on a solid-state Linux appliance that I can leave on 24/7 since it uses so little power.

Currently, I use two different companies as registrar (NameCheap) and DNS/e-mail/web hosting (A Small Orange), and my ISP provides customers with static IP's, so I won't have to use eg. DynDNS.

The appliance will host the two web sites, and possibly act as the domains' main DNS server and e-mail server for incoming e-mails (I'll use my ISP's MTA for outgoing e-mails, as some ISP's MTA refuse incoming connections from non-ISP's. I don't know how they can tell the difference,though).

Besides saving a bit of money, I'll have the freedom to install whatever software I want instead of being restricted to what my web hoster allows.

Am I correct about the steps involved in moving the sites from the hoster?

1. Inquire with either registrar or hoster whether they provide just DNS, and possibly e-mail services, so that I'd only use the appliance to host the two web sites. I'd actually rather leave DNS and e-mail out of the appliance
2. On appliance, install OS + web server, and if required, DNS and e-mail servers
3. Edit DNS so that the www record now points to the appliance
4. If hosting e-mail server on appliance, edit MX record in DNS accordingly
5. If need be, find backup MX and DNS servers.

Thank you.

Your registrar should be able to provide individual services so your steps are correct.

You should first install and configure your appliance and test it externally as you may need to do port forwarding on you ISP supplied router.

You should also check that your ISP's terms of service allow you to host websites, just because they give you a static IP this may not be the case. Obviously you can ignore their terms of service at your own risk.

Then ask yourself if you REALLY want to home-host. You'll need to keep your server software updated regularly across all the elements, apache/php/MySQL as necessary, is it really worth having to do all this maintenance when hosting can be picked up for under $5 a month?

Hi there,

from my own experience I can say it is. Not from the aspect of costs and effort, but for the freedom of configuration. If I had the necessary preconditions (static IP from my ISP), I would do that at once.

And while traditional, professional web hosting satisfies most of one's need, even for those who are a bit picky, mail hosting is normally a disaster (not to mention other services beside web and mail). The majority of providers offer just a very basic set of features: No chance for users editing their own mailbox settings without knowing the master account password. No configurable spam filter (not really anyway). No spam statistics. No blacklist/whitelist. No triggering of scripts on reception of mails matching a certain pattern.
And that's why I'd really love to host my own mail server if I could. But having a daily-changing IP, my only chance would be to rent an entire root server or vserver, and then the cost is way beyond what I'd be willing to spend.

[X] Doc CPU

Thanks for the feedback. Those two sites are basic, static sites (ie. no MySQL or PHP) so not worth paying to host them elsewhere, but I'm thinking of writing some dynamic apps in Python and need to install stuff my ISP doesn't support.

I'll go ahead and experiment. Thank you.

As with everything "experiences may vary", I've had gone from hand coded pages on geocities through to having an irc network to running my current hobby site doing 1.3M page displays a month as well as looking after the "day job" infrastructure that does around $2.5M of transactions a week, so was just throwing the questions to the OP to consider.

After running my own DNS and mail servers for over 10 years I migrated DNS to my registrar and gmail for mail handling. Meets my needs.

As for a VPS, prices are dropping all the time, so its worth keeping an eye out.

If you do have an ISP that can't/won't give you a static IP have you considered getting a router that can automatically update a dynamic dns provider?

Hi there,

that's what I'm doing right now, but only for strictly private purposes. I'm kind of doing my own dyndns on my own webspace. Actually, that's just HTTP proxying, since I can't update DNS records automatically. But it works for the most basic requirements.

But yea, it's really just HTTP. No chance to have other services that way. And that's partly because I don't want to depend on yet another third-party service.

[X] Doc CPU

Turns out my registrar NameCheap isn't a good replacement for e-mail (DNS is free), as their $2/year "Personal Mail" only allows a single alias.

Can someone recommend a cheap e-mail alternative that supports multiple aliases?

Thank you.

I'm going to move my domains to my private home server shortly too. I have a VPS with Hetzner and the price just going up every month(not much although) and the service not that great. My previous VPS was really great with Hetzner, but the current one just way too busy. The local monitor checks the server every 5 mins which is not capable to pick up the small lags. I have monitored the server outside with Zabbix and daily I got about 5-10 monitoring warnings, which are bad I guess.

Right now I pay £7.11 for the VPS and on Amazon I can get a Dual-Celeron mini-itx asus board for £62. http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B...A3P5ROKL5A1OLE

Off course the board will be much slower than the VPS, but it will be much stable I'm pretty sure.
When the server having issues I can't even reach the site, neither the SSH console.

I've got 100/10M download/upload speed at home with a dynamic IP address, IP changed only about 1-1.5 years once! (Virginmedia)
So all in all it will be the home NAS server with my few sites on it. 10 months covers the price, although I need to pay some extra money for the electric, but this box only use about 17W when fully loaded. (HDD + 5W)

No-ip.org works fine, if you need a backup MX record, I used them.