Since the options for setting up your own server have been discussed, I will talk about paying a hosting company.<br><br>As of today, I have been moving my hosting accounts from <a href="http://powweb.com">powweb.com</a> to
<a href="http://1and1.com">1and1.com</a> (developer package). Powweb was great, I was with them for about 6 years. It is $7.99 a month and it saved me the hassle of a lot of different aspects of running a website. I moved because 1and1 just provides a lot more (
1.5TB of monthly bandwidth, 150GB of space...) and I am going to start a web project that will most likely consume a lot of bandwidth. Anyways, I just wanted to let you know that this option is available... Powweb uses FreeBSD servers and I'm not too sure what 1and1 runs but I know it's linux. In the end, time is money. If you want to learn, then setting it up yourself would be your best bet.
<br><br>On another note, I was the webmaster for San Dimas High School (In the Bonita Unified School District) and their host is just a typical one like Powweb if that means anything.<br><br>Hope this helps,<br><br>Matthew Gallizzi
<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 5/18/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Dustin Laurence</b> <<a href="mailto:dustin@laurences.net">dustin@laurences.net</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
On Thu, May 18, 2006 at 06:36:13PM -0700, Emerson, Tom wrote:<br><br>> > -----Original Message----- Of Joel Witherspoon<br>> ><br>> > I work for a school district and we are looking to host<br>> > our own website and many years and dollars with an provider.
<br>><br>> (I presume you meant "and SAVE many dollars instead of paying a<br>> provider...")<br><br>Keep in mind that what you'll be doing is trading time and knowledge for<br>money. That's fine, provided both are available. If not, consider
<br>getting one of the $10-$20/mo. hosting services and pay them to spend<br>time getting the server back up after a hardware failure. Keep in mind<br>that you still have to pay for the bandwidth. On the other hand, if you
<br>buy the pipe then you don't have bandwidth charges.<br><br>> > Besides the Cobalt servers, what other type of linux based<br>> > web server appliances are out there?<br>><br>> Any cast-off PC for starters ;) [Well, maybe not the ones David is
<br>> using if you expect a significant amount of traffic -- then again,<br>> serving plain static pages doesn't take much effort...]<br><br>It takes very little to run a website, though it depends on what you<br>want to host. If it is static HTML then you can probably buy an NSLU2
<br>for $100, install Linux, and pay very little in power as well. If you<br>use an old PC you'll be paying a noticable power bill (for a home--for a<br>school it might well be *way* below the noise). If you want to run a
<br>Plone site, well, you can probably do it on a not-too-old desktop PC but<br>not on a little nas device!<br><br>Judging from my own experience at home, if there is money to invest up<br>front it will probably pay off in a couple of years to invest in a lower
<br>power machine (say based on a Via chip or even one of the desktop<br>Pentium-M boards). But I bet logic has nothing to do with it. If the<br>school doesn't question the hundreds or even thousands of dollars a<br>month it must take to power a school each month but won't cough up a few
<br>hundred dollars for hardware, definitely go with cast-off PC gear and<br>totally ignore power costs. That's the hand they dealt you.<br><br>> Do you have any metrics from your current site? [pages and/or bytes<br>
> transferred per month, day, hour] Is the site heavy with server-side<br>> "stuff" [java/perl CGI's, databases, etc.] Do your site developers use<br>> proprietary design tools (ASP) [I presume not, since you're asking about
<br>> linux based servers, but it never hurts to check...]<br><br>I totally agree with this--the big thing is to get a very good idea of<br>what you expect from this server. Who writes the website? Talk to them<br>first of all! Know your bandwidth targets and exactly what server
<br>software you have to run. Also reliability expectations--if heads will<br>roll if there is downtime, then someone has to pay for failover or<br>better hardware than old PCs.<br><br>If none of these answers are known, then perhaps you don't know enough
<br>yet to do the job right?<br><br>Dustin<br><br><br></blockquote></div><br>