My boss wants to host our site ourselves, we’ve had real problems with our current host and he is no convinced that we should do it ourselves. I’ve taken a look at a couple servers and he’s happy to spend about £1,500 on one. I’ve never had any experience with actually installing/running a server. I know PHP but not this.
Is this relatively straight forward to do? It would need to run on Linux. We’re soon to launch our new website and want to get this all in place.
You really want to get with a good dedicated host. Unless you happen to have a datacenter with gads of bandwidth, primary and secondary connections, primary and secondary power and 24x7 monitoring.
Agree with wwb_99, self hosting is a waste of time pretty much, even if you were experienced I’d still recommend you don’t do it. Connectivity, speed, reliability, security, cost effectiveness will never match what you’ll get from hosting in a data centre.
I definitely agree with the two previous posters. At the agency I used to work for before starting my own business, they had a server in-house (I believe for testing etc) and another one located in a datacenter somewhere nearby. Fire-safe, backed up, secured 24/7 and so on. The in-house server we backed up among other ways once a week on an external drive that was taken home.
I wouldn’t run production stuff self-hosted like that, it’s just not safe enough unless you have what wwb_99 mentioned, and I doubt you do.
But if you do go with the self-hosted option, you’ll want to be very comfortable with the Linux command line. If you are, it should be pretty straight-forward, yes. “Just” decide what software you want to run the stuff on, what distro to use (I use CentOS on my VPS) and install it, and configure it.
If you’re not very comfortable, I suggest choosing a distro that has a nice user base for the software you use (Apache and PHP perhaps) so that you can get good support if you hit any problems—it’s likely you’ll have to post on a forum or do some Googling.
As mentioned, CentOS is my choice but I also like Debian, and a lot of people swear by Ubuntu. Last project I set up a VPS for, I used Nginx as web server instead of Apache for a Ruby on Rails site. It’s not very difficult as long as you’re comfortable dealing with command line.
I’m pretty sure you can find a fully managed dedicated server provider that can keep you happy. Self hosting, for what seems to be a serious project, without retaining the services of an experienced server admin, is a bad idea. Typical office security doesn’t compare with proper data center security either.
Even I got to say the same thing only. You can easily find a good host who provide good dedicated hosting services. It is always difficult to take care of managing servers your own.
