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I am using a rackspace account that charge me $40 month for a 120 Mb/s shared VPS for an online store

The store do not have much traffic and with the current fiber symetrical high speed conections here in spain I am thinking to use one of this at home/work to allocate my server.

I am really scared about attacks as internet this days have become much more dangerous than the ancient times when people usually use home-servers for things like email, but I have read a lot of nightmares about running a internet server at home.

Are the home routers prepared to get several request from the internet? or is there any limit of connections? are people having a lot of security problems in their networks having a home server in the same ip? I am planing to use a hard-firewall of the one built in the router but do not know if this is enough these days.

thank you.

You're probably better looking at SOHO routers rather than home ones. SonicWALL do a fairly comprehensive range and having used their higher end stuff in the past, I'm reasonably comfortable recommending those.

Sophos do a good range of UTM devices too. They have a free for home use product which can be put onto a VM or onto physical hardware. It's the same code as their core UTM product but restricted to 50 IP addresses

https://www.sophos.com/en/products/free ... ition.aspx

Is this a Linux server or a Microsoft one? If it's a Linux one then you might as well just use the Linux server for the router portion as well. With automatic updates on, ports locked down and fail2ban running, your Linux server will be fine. I wouldn't expose a Microsoft box to the Internet.

You sure you can get a static IP on your home connection? Many ISPs do offer them but not all and most don't give you one unless you ask.

It may be against the T&Cs of your broadband contract to run a webserver on it and it's even possible your ISP blocks some ports to stop you. Assuming they aren't actually blocking you'd probably get away with it assuming it isn't too busy.

If you just use the basic router you get from your ISP your server will have to be on the same network as the rest of your house. That will work just fine but if the server gets hacked it gives the hackers access to your house. Also if a desktop gets hacked it might give them access to the server. It would be nice to have a proper firewall that allows you to have multiple networks so you can isolate the server. You can pickup something that can do that for about 50euro but setting it up would be complicated. Nice to have but not essential.

Email... Your server almost certainly won't be able to send email (at least not reliably) from your home connection without using a smarthost.

Just remember that your home broadband connection won't be anything like as reliable as the datacentre so expect the site to be down more often.

How about a cheaper VPS? Linode has plans starting at $5/month. For a low-traffic site one of their lower tier offerings should be sufficient.

$10/month gets you 2GB RAM, 30GB storage (SSD-based), 2TB/month of data transfer, and gigabit connectivity to the 'net.

You do NOT want to run a web-server at home. Let me repeat: you do NOT want to run a web-server at home. Tu no quieres tener un servidor en tu casa!

You're going to get into all sorts of trouble: power outs, problems or expense getting a static IP from your provider, having to keep hardware going 24/7 with absolutely zero interruptions, having enough bandwidth, monitoring so you know what to do when a DoS comes, and so on and so forth.

What you really want is what JBI said above: an affordable third-party hosting service, like Linode, Amazon, DigitalOcean, etc. Linode has a datacenter in Germany so that's close enough. Here's the pricing table. Note: I have no affiliation with Linode, I'm just a happy customer (well, TR is).

Yeah, for anything business related it's just not a good idea to run your own server at home. When there's services like Linode, AWS and Azure around it's just not worth the trouble especially if you're not particularly interested in the setup and configuration of the server its self. All of the actual administration of the machine can be done remotely just as easily as if it was in the next room in your house.

Yup, this:

just brew it! wrote:

How about a cheaper VPS? Linode has plans starting at $5/month. For a low-traffic site one of their lower tier offerings should be sufficient.

$10/month gets you 2GB RAM, 30GB storage (SSD-based), 2TB/month of data transfer, and gigabit connectivity to the 'net.

morphine wrote:

You do NOT want to run a web-server at home. Let me repeat: you do NOT want to run a web-server at home. Tu no quieres tener un servidor en tu casa!

You're going to get into all sorts of trouble: power outs, problems or expense getting a static IP from your provider, having to keep hardware going 24/7 with absolutely zero interruptions, having enough bandwidth, monitoring so you know what to do when a DoS comes, and so on and so forth.

I'm happy running my personal website via my home based ESXi server. The server and network infrastructure is connected to a UPS to handle brownouts and brief power outages. My IP rarely changes. I have unlimited bandwidth and my service is fairly decent (250/20).

If I was more serious about it I'd fire up an AWS instance.

When something breaks, it's always much better that it's Someone Else's Problem. There are no cost savings here. As a fun project, sure, but with VM pricing as low as it is, why even bother?

just brew it! wrote:

How about a cheaper VPS? Linode has plans starting at $5/month. For a low-traffic site one of their lower tier offerings should be sufficient.

$10/month gets you 2GB RAM, 30GB storage (SSD-based), 2TB/month of data transfer, and gigabit connectivity to the 'net.

I'm with JBI on this. With Rackspace you are paying extra for their top support, there are cheaper options.

As it has been said already, don't run it from home. It makes no sense. Both Rackspace and Amazon are pretty expensive for this, much better options are the VPS providers, from my point of view the top choice there being Linode as well. The $10 instance should be enough for your needs, I would not go with the $5 one as I expect that will be on hosts that are pretty contested.

If you want to run some experiments then it's well worth checking out the low-end scene - see Low End Box. There are some incredible bargains to be had if you can do without dedicated IP addresses. If you want a more serious provider, then Vultr and Scaleway are pretty fantastic value. Unless you know you need the extra resource - go lean