Is it Feasible to Host Your Personal Website From Your Home Computer System?
Doing your own hosting sounds like it can save you a lot of money and easy to perform. The idea is doable and it can work, but you will run into problems down the road.
It does sound like a great idea to setup a piece of hardware, install WordPress, choose one of the best WordPress themes out of hundreds and set off to host your own website. But as you will find is most internet provider companies monitor the bandwidth used by their customers and would come to investigate any heavy usage. Along with that, there are four other areas of concern.
Host Security
It is fulltime job to secure all the facets of your hosting configuration not to mention ensuring your visitor’s security and safety while viewing your website. It may seem like it is easy, but unless you are running an enterprise solution on your home hardware, it can be overwhelming trying to keep up with the latest threats.
The Use of Bandwidth
I touched on this subject already above, but you can be sure to get a visit from your local internet provider if you go over the recommended bandwidth usage. If they see you using more than is the norm, they will start to investigate. Further, many internet providers have placed a cap on client usage and charge a hefty fine for over usage.
If you are planning to host any kind of internet site out of your home, you’ll definitely need to invest in a pricey internet business plan. Some plans can run into the thousands of dollars a month.
Server Hardware
Another expense you need to be aware of is hardware. You will either need to invest in a workstation of a mini rack server to handle the job. Mini rack servers will provide redundancy and other protective measures in case of a major hard drive failure or power failure.
Support
No company gets away without having some kind of support. Yet if you are hosting your own business from home, you will need to ramp up on support. A day will not go by where you will not have someone sending you a request, help ticket or some other communication concerning your hosted website.
There are just a few areas where you will need to focus on if you want to host your own website. You now may understand why so many online marketers, bloggers and webmasters, pay for hosting from an external provider than hosting the site themselves.
For less than ten dollars a day an online site can be hosted and maintained. Not to mention reside on servers that are robust, fast and maintained through 24/7 support. If a website goes down, just a phone call, email or online chat a website can be back online and operating normally. Unless you are a huge corporation, it does not make financial sense to host your own website.
