Setting up your own webserver

[fragle]

Why do you prefer a home-webserver, instead of using the now-abundant free file hosting services on the net? With the webserver, you'd need to keep the pc up all the time, and if you were to also use the same connection for your daily browsing/torrenting/gaming/whatever, anyone downloading from you would get very poor download speeds to boot. And i don't think a separate line for the server is cheaper than hosting services

If you're accepting alternatives, maybe you could try sharing through irc file servers? They have a more established community around this "from home" file serving with persistent queues, bandwidth caps and stuff. Or maybe try something with torrents?

As for filling the dedicated server storage, i think you could initially just copy files disk-to-disk by connecting the server disk to your own pc, and after that uploading through the net whatever new stuff comes out. And when you get some followers for your web site, you could ask them to upload stuff for you

[Brainer]

fragle, nice idea! How could I forget about IRC? Silly me... And torrents... Hmm, that may be a good idea, I could seed every torrent to three complete downloads and then just disable it. That'd do the trick.

Yip, you're right there. I'd need to establish another line, which is pretty expensive. It's not that hard to cover electricity costs, so it won't be a problem if the PC run 24/7.

And how could I possibly connect the server disk located in fx. Germany with mine?

[Pyrogine]

If you do get your server up and going (or any server for that matter), be sure to secure it well. A friend had one setup some years ago (win2k I think) and it was his first attempt. After about 3 days, someone hacked his FTP, changed the passwords so they could get back in any time they wanted and began to transform it into a warez site. Sigh. He found it early because he just happen to be working on the server that day and noticed all those folders that he did not make. So, make sure you secure it well.

At every moment you can pretty much assume that someone is trying to find a unsecured port or back door to your box. And I can not stress the important of having a good backup scheme because at some point you WILL have to use it.

[noeska]

yes it always fun to read login attempts in my server log files. They just throw in a bunch of random names and just try to login.

[User137]

...
:arrow: That's still not enough. Let's say there are 600 clients connected. So it's 25,6 * 6 = 153, 6 MB.
That exceeds the overall connection speed of Rapidshare, but still you are able to download at 256 kB/s. :| How is it done?

It is not possible to exceed the maximum capacity the connection has due to technical limitations, and service provider of Rapidshare. They can however reduce speed first on user connections that are not paid members, adding queues etc.

What comes to my ISP, i have a 2mbit/512 cable connection from them, and they say in rules that using that connection as public server is not allowed. It is however a extra service for was it 10 euro per month...

And i'm sure you may have more options in reality than your ADSL. Its true though that major connections are around big cities. The lines that connect your country to other world hold possibly for terabytes per second. They split to numerous IS providers.

What i mean, to hold server you may need a connection that is not one of the commonly used but fast and unfortunately more expensive ones.

And question; where do universities and other schools go asking when they need to be lined up to internet? Generally those speeds are very very high, especially universities in my country go through gigabytes per second.