Yes,

My brother in law, brought a brand new Athlon XP 1800 1.53 Ghz Processor. 512 MB Ram, and a 40 gig hard drive. He read somewhere about running a webhosting company, and thought it would be fun and bring in a great amount of money.

He wanted to know, if theres a way, he could set up and run a server on his computer.

I didn't know what to tell him, sometimes I think I know the answer,and it turns out I don't. :D


Can you guys help us out?

Please tell us if its possible
What all would we need
and How much it would run us.

Sure he can. Just install linux on it (free for download on many mirrors).
Then you find a nice co-location place and place your server there.

If you have to ask... don't. Running a web hosting company isn't a trivial matter; there are scripts and control panels which can do most of the work for you, but things *will* go wrong, and if you don't know what you're doing, you'll have a lot of unhappy customers. (For a brief time, at least... before long, you won't have any customers.)

From what I have read..most people would say:

"Buy a reseller account or if you want to go suicidal buy a dedicated server"

Well, if he/you don't know much about running webhosting..I suggest you look through the older and new threads in these forums..very very helpful.. If you go with a reseller account, you will not be fully controlling everything, but usually have a control panel where you can handle most stuff..and if your customer has a question you cant answer..you can look to the person who you resell through.. If you are slightly advanced..you can buy a dedicated server and start from there, get a good cp..install the latest mods..and go from there.. Not to mention..you need a merchant acct. to accept money..i.e. paypal, 2checkout, etc. OR if you are rich already and just want more money for fun or something..lol...check out authorize.net...they have some good stuff there..

-I wish I could say "My 2 cents" but somebody already took that ^^

The webhosting industry isn't an oppurtunity to make a large amount of cash in no time at all.

I agree it can be profitable, and I agree that it can be fun - but as others have said, don't base it on your computer at home, and make you research before you do anything.

Originally posted by voxtreme-matt
make you research before you do anything.

Agreed. This isn't something that you can just jump into and jump out of as you please.

Yea,


We understand that.. Thanks for the comments, we're going to do alot of research. What if we decide just to host our own site on there. Decide, not to sell space to anyone. Would it be easier?


Any more comments, keep them coming.

Another thing people seem to avoid thinking about is connectivity. Running your computer at home off your DSL connection is all fine and well if it stays up, but isn't going to compare to something like this:
http://www.nac.net/images/networkmaps/nacnetworkmap.gif

If you wish to host your own site locally then that's your choice, but for the good of others please don't try to host other people's websites on your own computer. You may just be the cause of someone ending up out of business without food on the table.

I don't think I can stress the importance of the level of responsibility hosting entails. Your attention to detail and level of research towards providing a quality product is something customers are going to assume you've taken steps to accomplish. There have been threads on this forum that have sent chills through me at times.

Greg Moore

Thanks. Im starting to think a little hard about this