Website hosting certainly falls under the purview of economist Adam Smith’s doctrine of division of labour. On the surface it may seem like such a nice money saving idea to be your own web host, but there really is a lot to it. Prior to starting to purchase gear for web hosting, think of all that is entailed in terms of web hosting on your own.
Server: A server is a very powerful computer that is specially configured to deal with network tasks. For a short time, you may be able to get away with buying your own server for a small-scale business. Both IBM and Hewlett Packard offer quality servers. In addition, Dell is a good server provider.
Security: Securing your server is probably the biggest reason not to attempt to do your own website hosting. Hackers and spammers remain one step ahead of security experts — not the other way around. Security is an ongoing, highly technical task. It is absolutely not a matter of buying some sort of server security suite. Unless you have a Redhat or A++ certified administrator or the like on staff, you will probably want to forget the idea of doing your own web hosting.
Software Licensing: The majority of server operating systems are licensed for a given amount of simultaneous users. Getting licenses to cover your software can be really costly.
Network: It will be necessary to obtain a data trunk in the location where you want to base the server. It is highly unlikely that you will be able to just connect your server to your ISP. Some users try that for personal websites and playing around, but you should avoid doing that when hosting your own website as the ISP will restrict your bandwidth. If you are still convinced you want to do your own hosting, and your resource needs are minimal, look into the TOS (Terms of Service) with your ISP.
You will also need to acquire equipment like a handy off-site backup system for your data, as well as a sturdy battery backup to take care of power glitches.
Employees: If you are short a network guru, then you must hire one who is available 24/7 with on call support.
Servers and networks go bad all the time, the best ones included. You cannot just set it and forget it. Absolutely not.
Bottom Line: Your website will benefit from the powerful and reliable servers that leased web hosting will provide, saving you a large expenditure on hardware and labor — and headache and downtime. Unless you have an enormous amount of web traffic and a full-time IT staff, it will be much more costly and will cause many problems for you to host your own website. It is possible to find quality shared web hosting for sites that aren’t sizable, beginning around $ 10 monthly. It would be pretty hard to do better than that!
Stephen Grisham, Sr. is a copy writer for InfoServe Media, LLC. InfoServe Media is a Houston Website hosting and custom Web site design company. If you just need a few changes to an existing site, InfoServe Media also offers website maintenance.
