ECOMING your own Web host and E-mail administrator is troublesome. It’s a challenge, but a very unproductive one, which can lead to entanglement and nervousness.

Try to imagine hosting your site the DIY way. Think of managing E-mail on your own workstation or a personal Web server; not a dedicated Web server, but one which is owned and run by yourself. Such server would reside in a not-so-secure environment, which is bound to lose power at times while no generator is available. Data on the server begs for regular backups that are time consuming. Moreover, the server may lose its Internet connection or suffer from bandwidth spikes, making stability and resilience prone to great risk. On top of it all, the server will require software updates on occasion, which are easier for a professional host to take care of. The professional uses time more effectively because all is done in ‘batch mode’ — hundreds of sites affected by an upgrade in one fell swoop. Experience plays a role too.

Lastly, on a less technical and more personal level, I reckon that ‘self-sysadmining’ would be too emotional. Although I have the knowledge required for doing it, as well as 3 boxes at my disposal for the purpose, I believe this could lead to a resource hog to begin with. Without peers involved and in the lack of diverse experience, the step would be a daunting one too. By running code that is questionable the Web server, which is never to be considered a computational server, everything is put at risk, even the mail daemon. Mechanical faults are another issue as there are no alternative hardware to divert that traffic ‘aqueduct’ onto.

Related items:

• Remote Data
• Leave the Hard Stuff to Someone Else (external)

This entry was posted on Friday, December 9th, 2005 at 4:18 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.