Friday, December 16, 2016

Hosting a website on your home Internet connection

There relative advantages and disadvantages of this.

The advantage of this is that you have unlimited storage space and all of your source code is located on your server. You can also use the activity to learn about how webservers and the Linux operating system works. You can experiment with re-directs and other directives that you have access to as the person who administers the server. 

However, the disadvantages - I think - outweigh any advantages. This is the reason that I stopped hosting my website on my Rogers cable Internet connection. I found that I was spending too much time in administrative tasks and warding off all the spammers and those probing my server for things that I had missed and were potential vulnerabilities. In addition, as the hosting was on my home IP address this made its location far easier to determine.

Rogers were reasonably vague in their TOS in regards to hosting a website on the connection but additional bandwidth and traffic that they would have to handle would be considerably greater if all their subscribers did the same thing. As a business, Rogers were probably more than happy for you contact them for a "commercial" hosting package, although as I was not a business I was not interested in that. Besides, there were many other alternatives to going that route.

I guess that I felt a little guilty in using my Rogers connection and I reviewed their TOS to make sure that I was not in violation. At no time was I contacted by Rogers saying that I should not have been doing what I was doing. They certainly weren't hosting my website and they didn't cut me off.

At the same time as running a website I was looking at the possibility of a mail server. This was also the same time as the Snowden Revelations coming out of the States and there was much discussion about the security of email and the surveillance carried out by governments. Quite frankly a webserver was bad enough t make secure I dread to think what would have been involved with a mail server,

I learnt a lot from running a webserver out of my basement but the time came when I had to move on. Unfortunately at the same time that I was experimenting with my server was that I attracted the attentions of someone who did not like what I had posted on my website and this blog. I am sure that he thought that my website and blog were purely about him and there could be no other possible reason. My coverage of him and his antics was only ever a very small attribute of the two. In fact, when I took the server off-line I took pains to repost the content about him on this blog. I created posts that were contemporary with the original pages on my site.

After a period of time, having taken the server off-line in 2011 I arranged new hosting for tempusfugit.ca in 2012. Where it has been hosted ever since.

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