About the host server

This blog, as well as some other of more or less private websites, is hosted on a home server I setup for the occasion. In a series of different articles I will detail how exactly I did to get running different services. I hope it would be helpful for some others who would like to do the same.

Why this server ?

There are many reasons for using a home server instead of using the services of free web hosts.

In fact, some internet actors are constantly warning about internet services to be more and more centralized. At its origin, all internet actors were both clients and servers. Now, most internet actors are users, expecting some services to be provided from web hosts, mail hosts, video hosts, photo hosts, and a significantly growing trend lets people communicate through closed social networks.

Not only this is a problem for privacy, but this encourages internet providers to provide asymetric accesses like ADSL (yep, `A' stands for ``asymetric'') for instance. And this also encourages our dear governments to consider most internet users as potential pirates, as most internet accesses bandwidth is used for file sharing (at least that is what they think). I have bought bandwidth, so I am decided to use it !

Technical details

So, basically the server is a dedicated nettop PC with a Intel Atom processor and 2 GB of RAM, running a Debian GNU/Linux Lenny system.

The web server is Apache, and the database server is PostgreSQL. The blog system uses the Dotclear PHP application. It does not yet handle personal e-mail, but I really intend to let it handle it aswell.

Stay tuned for the upcoming series of articles dealing with home web hosting.

Comments

1. On 30/04/2009, 10:39 by MoL

Hi Ouasse !
What kind of nettop do you have ? many websites have talked about asus eeebox, but there are other nettops .... or something like a shuttle made by your on ?
See you ...

2. On 30/04/2009, 11:16 by ouasse

Hi MoL! The nettop is indeed a Asus EeeBox. I have read a lot of stuff concerning the different available hardware, but Asus's box was definitely looking the best shaped for my purpose.