Web Hosting from Home

Deafened Ivy

Some time, I'd like to learn HTML to a high level and create a simple website just for the fun of it. I've read before that it's possible to host a small site on a laptop or PC. I'd rather host a basic site from home since it would be advertisement free and cost nothing. I know there would be very low upload speeds but it would be mostly text and simple graphics etc.

Do any Irish ISPs allow sites to be hosted from home? Would it depend on the availability of a fibre-optic connection? How would I find out this information?

onemorechance

If they allow torrenting of copy-righted material then a legitimate small size website should not be an issue!

I think they will block incoming traffic to port 80 if they don't want you hosting a site. Sorry but I don't know about what Irish ISP's allow. Hopefully someone here will know.

Maybe search their websites for T&C's. You could try emailing a few of them and ask. Say it's a school project or something and almost zero users and no large data. If they say no to that then keep looking!

If you host from home some things to bear in mind:

Security; you are opening your computer to the world. Use an old, cheap computer rather then your regular day-to-day computer. You need very little RAM, memory or processor to run a simple text and graphics website. A $25 raspberry pi will be more than enough.

IP address; some ISP's will give you a static IP, it will not change so you are easy to find. Some will give you a dynamic IP; it can change making it harder to find you.

Woofstuff

Deafened Ivy wrote: »

Some time, I'd like to learn HTML to a high level and create a simple website just for the fun of it. I've read before that it's possible to host a small site on a laptop or PC. I'd rather host a basic site from home since it would be advertisement free and cost nothing. I know there would be very low upload speeds but it would be mostly text and simple graphics etc.


Do any Irish ISPs allow sites to be hosted from home? Would it depend on the availability of a fibre-optic connection? How would I find out this information?

You probably don't need hosting.. Install wamp or xammp or similar.. (if you need database stuff)

You might not even need to do that. You can open your first html page and if all the pages are linked you can see them all in the browser

tricky D

I strongly suggest you just get some basic hosting. It's cheap enough these days. If you are in anyway serious about learning, €50 a year is small beer.

You could also do what Woofstuff says, but only serve it locally. DO NOT serve it to the world, it is a security nightmare and static IPs aren't always available on many ISPs. The economic cost of setting this up ie. keeping it secure and learning how to set it all up would take so much time that €50 for hosting, with its easy and quick setup, is a bargain.

Also from a quick search the annual costs of many static IPs will dwarf €50 easily (setup and business account reqs), never mind the time overhead.

Short answer: forget home hosting and get it from one of the regular hosting providers: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=53028341&postcount=2

mneylon

A lot of the ISPs won't allow it.

With most you'd need to have a business plan in order to be allowed to do it and get a static IP.

If you just want to play around and learn then you could easily setup a "server" locally and play with that, but once you put it on the internet it's a totally different ball game entirely ..

ChRoMe

Blacknight wrote: »

A lot of the ISPs won't allow it.

With most you'd need to have a business plan in order to be allowed to do it and get a static IP.

If you just want to play around and learn then you could easily setup a "server" locally and play with that, but once you put it on the internet it's a totally different ball game entirely ..

You dont even need a static IP, just use a service such as dyndns.

onemorechance

As others have mentioned, if it's only for your own learning, then you don't need to make your site available on the internet. You can run and access full websites, most especially simple text and graphics, from your local machine only.

If it's HTML, CSS, Javascript, local images and content, then you don't even need a local web server running. You will only need a web server if you are using things like Java, PHP, MySQL etc.

fergalr

If cost is the main issue, it might be helpful to know that you can get an amazon ec2 micro, a virtual machine on the internet, free for a year.

Its not trivial to setup if you are not familiar, but its a cheap option if you dont mind spending a while messing around with tutorials.

Also, Google App Engine provides essentially free hosting. Again, you need to learn a bit to use it - but theres plenty of tutorials out there on using it for free hosting.

Both of these have no ads.
You can probably also find other free web hosting options, but those two definitely work.

fergalr

Actually, I have just come across this by chance, I think it is exactly what you need:

http://neocities.org/

Deafened Ivy

Thanks for the suggestions everyone! I think I'll give the neocities thing a try and then maybe get a Raspberry Pi sometime in the future.

frozenfrozen

Use amazon ec2. free for a year on the first tier. Just like having your own physical server