should I host my own?

I think I just a royal scr------ing from my hosting (surpasshosting.com) when they changed a security setting two days before Christmas and crashed a majority of a bunch of websites' pages. The real kicker is they had just set up the server a few months prior and didn't even notify me they were going to make the changes. They even refused to make a credit for the month but regardless of how good their price is crap, at any price, is pretty expensive.

I run just a basic home pc with an AMD 1300 with 256k ram. I'm with Comcast cable as my ISP provider with an upload speed of 150 (compared to a download of 3000).

I have played around with setting up LAMP in Ubuntu. Had some minor issues setting up but nothing insurmountable.

My question is  -  is it be worthwhile to do my own hosting? I can't afford to have a hosting company pull that kind of crap again and/or take a chance on a new host.

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yeah do this if your traffic is low and you know enough about security

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It is not only about security. Hosting a site in your home may cause downtime problems as there are no datacenter standards in a home

In my opinion if you need a low server as this, you can rent a dedicated for about $30 which is very reasonable (just check the banners that rotate in this forum )

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maybe I read it wrong (thought he need a free host )

There are really good shared hosting companies, try mediatemple.net

I don't think its a good idea to host on your home connection.  Sometimes its also against your ToS.

I would start looking around at small shared hosting or some of the VPS solutions - if you need that kind of reliability.  You have to understand that if you have a website that can't 'afford' to be down, hosting it on your home connection is a VERY bad idea - since their uptime is not near any guarantee of a hosting company usually. 

Just my $0.02USD (which by the time I post this should be worth $0.01938... hah )

I'd have to agree that hosting on your own machine is probably a bad idea.

Like Aaron said, it may be a violation of your cable company's ToS.  I know for Cablevision it is.  I'd guess that Comcast has a similar ToS, so you'd be violating it by hosting a website.

And you're likely to have downtime issues at home as well - Comcast's network could go out, your power could go out, your cat could pull the plug out of the wall.  With a low traffic site, it's certainly feasible to host a website on a home pc, but that doesn't mean you'll be any more reliable than another host.

My suggestion would be to just find a better webhost.

Back to the original issue, though, what type of security setting did they change?  Was it something in the Apache setup?  Or PHP?

If it's a change in the php.ini file, you can override this by creating your own php.ini file for your site.  That way you can a) configure php exactly the way you want, and b) not have to worry about the host screwing it up by changing settings on you.

- Walkere

They did something to prevent using the php include function for remotely hosted urls. I had had a problem when they first set me up on the server after I had been having other problems on a different server but we corrected those with a php.ini file. Three months afterwards someone decided the phpini wasn't right and everything crashed. I ended up using a curl fix. If a different php.ini config could could have changed it I think they would have told me. They wanted me to use curl.

When I researched for the fix I found it was a fairly common movement to block including remote urls by the shared hosting companies and it was causing a lot of hair pulling across the board.

It took a few more days for me to figure out to that the change blocked some php email functions to and I had to make changes to the accessuserclass email verifications

If a different php.ini config could could have changed it I think they would have told me. They wanted me to use curl.

Sounds like they really screwed you up...  but just because they didn't suggest a custom php.ini doesn't mean anything (although I don't know if it would have helped in your situation).

I recently moved a site from a free to a paid host, and the new host had php set up as a cgi executable.  This caused my site to crash because I had the .htaccess set up to modify some php.ini settings (like register_globals).

I was trying to figure out how to fix the problem, and they wanted to discuss which settings I'd like changed so that they could see about changing it server wide.  I figured out on my own that I could just create my own php.ini file and fine-tune all the settings I wanted without wasting my time with them.

- Walkere

There are better quality shared hosting companies out there that are affordable.  Hosting it on your own will cause more issues than what you dealt with that company.  Security is a big one, connection issues, etc.

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