Hosting Websites at home worth it?

[dermotti]

It seems there are so many hosts out there offering 4.95 a month for hosting.

Currently i am hosting all my websites at home on a 2.8ghz PC. No a ton of traffic at all, and its on my DSL pipe.

Would the power consumption alone be more than 4.95 a month?

[lonce]

I am a huge fan of home hosting. Its cheaper by far in the long run, not to mention you are in control of what and how its run. For 4.95 all you can count on is the webspace. They can drop for no reason, slow down for no reason. I have to use hosting becuase comcast wont let me run a server. I have run my own servers in the past and its much easier and better in my opinion. If you start to get traffic, you will want your own server. At godaddy to have your own server is like 60 bucks a month. Once you get more traffic, you will see the benefits. When you need to scale bigger, and all it costs is 300 for a used pc rather than another 60 a month for as long as you run it.

[dermotti]

Hmm, is there anyway to figure out how much power my PC is using per month?

Specs:

2.8ghz P4
1 geforce 6200
Wireless Nic
2 x 80g harddrives
300 watt P/s
Sound Card
1 DVD drive

NO MONITOR, Mouse, or Keyboard.

Load averages are usually next to nothing, sites get maybe 180 unique hits a day max.

Its running Xubuntu.

[lonce]

I think you would want to plan ahead though. What happens if you get hosting at 4.95 a month on limited total bandwidth and start getting traffic?

Your hosting will just shut it off, until you pay more a month. If you site gets dug, your SOL. If you have it on yours, there is no monthly cap on bandwidth, as much as you want all your limited too is your upload bandwidth, but you could max it out all month. Then if it gets too much, get a business line from comcast for 75 a month, and all bets are off, take 1000000 uniques a day, it wont matter. But that is my 2 cents.