Home Hosting

Since the Xojo Cloud isn’t on the scene yet I figured I should look at other options. Hostgator has “semi-managed” VPS solutions starting at about 20 bucks a month. Others appear similarly priced. Reading about running a VPS makes me bored. So, what about hosting the server myself?

First of all, I would go with the MacOS. It’s straightforward. My needs are not that complicated. I have no desire to fumble around with Linux and see no advantage to Windows over Mac. The static IP is the next hurdle. I found some free and semi free (dollar-ish a month) solutions:

NoIP - Free

NoIP - Enhanced

A couple of commenters in the forums seemed to think that my service provider might end up blocking me if I went that route. Fine.

So, how much is a business internet service? In my case it’s only about $25 a month more than what I’m currently spending. And it’s a lot more bandwidth.

I’m curious if anyone else has tried this, and would be willing to comment? Are there any major issues I should be aware of?

Just to be clear, the business plan comes with one static IP address.

Nothing inherently wrong with it. Home broadband tends to have much slower upload than download. The other downside is power. How reliable is your power, does your internet still work if running off batteries? Is 24/7 uptime important to you?

DynDNS (dynamic DNS) offer a free service for 1 dynamic IP (at least they did last time I checked).
Most (allot of?) routers support dyndns.
Also they are just one of dozens of companies that can do this.

I do prefer a linux vm though and with amazons web services it could not be easier or cheaper.
$8 per month gets their micro server which I have verified works well.
Couple it with turnkeylinux and you have everything you need without any configuration required.

Aside from those options you can try virtual box which is cross platform and can run on your pc/mac - great for testing an isolated instance.

Oh right. That’s a good point.

Do you run the stand alone Xojo web app using amazon? This is something I should investigate. 8 bucks fits my budget perfectly.

Depending on where you are and who your ISP is… there are many that do not allow home hosting (it is a violation of their EULA)

Cox Cable (and I believe Time Warner and Comcast) all block incoming HTTP REQUEST packets… so no matter how you configure your ports… the packet never gets to your server … on purpose.

I signed up for the “free” AWS to try it out. Well, now I’m confronted with all of this:

I have no clue which one of these I want to click. A Cpanel this is not…

To be clear, this is the page I get upon logging on. It’s not just some random AWS page.

Your on the right page!

You need to launch an EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) instance.
When you do this it will ask you to chose an AMI (Amazon Machine Image).
These differ depending on the zone your in.
All the info you could ever want is here http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

The AMI I use is turnkeylinux’s LAMP stack (they have over 100 appliances).
Bitnami also have some good images, the biggest difference is that turnkey use debian and bitnami use RHEL.
I dont have the turnkey LAMP AMI reference offhand, I will have to look it up.

I have used both standalone and webserver dependent builds, however if you were using standalone I would use turnkeys “core” AMI because it has absolutely no bloat.

Read up on turnkey at turnkeylinux.org.

They also have an interface called “The Hub” (hub.turnkeylinux.org) which is MUCH easier to control instances in AWS’ cloud. It will cost extra coin though, about $10 a month for a basic account.

I use it and can highly recommend it and their backup mechanism TKLBAM (turnkey backup and migration) is simply awesome.

There is enough acronyms for now!

I have made video’s in the past on using turnkey linux and I am willing to do one for AWS but due to workload this week is not possible.
I will post to youtube next week and advise when its done.

in fact here is a crappy old one I did for virtual box - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trkprPSZ0lY

If you master that you will know all the basics.

Intro You can jump to 3:10 to jump to the log in part.

As per home server vs hosted server, you’ll still have to read up on how to manage /set everything up and you’ll most likely be accessing it in the same way, so it’s really down to potentially saving costs if you already have a spare server, but business connections generally are not cost effective when you compare a hosting company will probably give you a server for the same price + put you on a much faster line with backup ISP providers, fail over switches and what not.

If it’s about costs, why not try use a host like OVH? you used to be able to grab a cloud server for £7 a month but I think they are around £11 now (you actually pay by the hour and can scale it up /down and shutdown /start it whenever you want) and they used to throw everyone on a 100Mbit line as standard & 1Gbit if you were french… (they have their own peering network, though they’re changing their policy on that now)

Alternatively they have a sister brand called kimsurfi with £2.99 per month dedicated servers… but you can guess, those are sold out at the moment :stuck_out_tongue: (intel atoms 1.6Ghz micro servers basically)

I host several websites at home. I buy the domain name and put in a forward to my own IP with a specific port, so to distinguish different url’s. Don’t know how it is in the VS but I have 120 Mbit down and 20 Mbit up which is enough bandwidth for simple websites. This is consumer bandwidth by the way, so no guarantees, but I have never experienced problems.