I am a complete newbie to Linux, so forgive any apparent silly questions…
I currently run a shared hosting account with about 10 websites - mostly Wordpress but also one Drupal and one CMS Made Simple/PHPBB3. I am sick and tired of the hosting service running slow and failing, so I want to set up and run my own web server at home, using my ADSL connection (this is OK in TOC of my ISP). I can buy a permanent IP for $10 a month.
I have a Dual Core Pentium 4 box with 4GB of RAM and 500GB of disk space. I have installed OpenSUSE 12.1 on the box and a LAMP server. I am struggling with installing a remote GUI admin interface so I can restart the server when I’m at work in the city (subject of another post elsewhere).
I know I’ll need to run backups and have some kind of warm failover strategy in case of failure. I also expect I’ll have DNS and HTTPS issues to resolve. The sites are not high traffic. Between them they probably get around 6-8,000 visitors a month. Bandwidth typically runs at about 50GB per month.
What issues am I likely to run into doing this? Will my server be any faster or more reliable than my shared host (which is presumably a bigger box running Debian or similar)? Am I likely to face security issues?
The biggest issue is that the server needs to be available 24/7, over 365 days a year. In your case I’d opt for a cloud VPS. Yes, monthly fine will be higher that $10, but there will be no physical machine eating $20 / month and needing replacement every few years.
Can openSUSE run as a multi-site webserver? Of course it can, any linux distro can do this. Create folders in /srv/www/htdocs and point the domains to the folders instead of the webroot.
Another thing: If your ISP has a problem, so do the owners of the sites on your server…
To be straight forward: I’d never do this. Too much maintenance work on the server side, too many variables. A cloud VPS (sorry, Virtual Private Server) does not have these issues. Having moved from a private server to a VPS has
made life easier (VPS lives in a datacentre, hardware is not my problem, uptime so far 100%)
saved me money, that is, I pay approx $35 / month, but no electricity charges, no hardware costs
FYI: most VPS’s come with a control panel, which has a web interface, like cPanel, directAdmin, etc. that allow you to configure and maintain the LAMP.
Recommend you inspect the peak usage statistics for your existing websites, then consider whether your ADSL connection can support that (Usual rule of thumb is minimally twice the actual traffic numbers). Typically, if your websites have any kind of reasonable traffic, ADSL is insufficient.
As for whether openSUSE is suitable for small, maybe smaller “medium” deployments, I don’t see any “typical” issues… Although for heavier deployments openSUSE does <not> have an “Enterprise” kernel.
Knurpht describes one approach… Using VPS, which one type of implementing isolated virtual machines on a host system. There are other virtualization technologies, and it’s also possible to deploy all the web applications you describe on a single machine (no virtualization). Which approach is best depends on your needs, your expertise and what technologies you wish to become familiar with.
I would also recommend to check the CPU peak usage. Although things like phpBB are usually too light to create a significant load, other CMSes may be quiet heavy — even if they look simplistic. For example, running MediaWiki on a K7 can freeze a single user for half-minute per page (and more with extensions installed), no matter how many gigs of RAM does the server have. My more recent experience with running OTRS request-tracking system on a dual Xeon-HT with plenty of RAM and an array of 10K SCSI disks also showed that even when page generation time can be considered acceptable (for internal use by non-demanding user), it’s still too-o-o slow.
Perhaps, you could use some HTTP stress-testing tool to measure how many “typical requests” per second your server can handle; those requests should be to dynamic pages, not static content. Some applications display page generation time in the bottom of that page.
The chances are your server will be slower and less reliable because you don’t have a lot of admin experience. Also it’s almost guaranteed that you will face security issues. I administrate a couple of severs and there are attempted security breaches of some sort pretty much every hour. You have to make sure things are properly configured or it’s very easy to run into problems which could cause your server and even your users to be subject to malware and various security breaches.
With under 10,000 visitors a month you should have no problem finding a decent host for under $15 a month. There are plenty out there. Just be sure to read the reviews on them before committing. I think this is your best bet by far. It seems your issue now is that you have bad host.