Website & Private Web Server

[DaveLembke]

So I registered a domain name and paid the extra to have the other variants of .org, .net and so on and configured all those within godaddy to redirect to my main website of www.mywebsite.com ( which its not that name but not sure if sharing of actual domain name is allowed here as for it could be shady in use as advertising through here which likely isnt allowed, so I went with www.mywebsite.com as example. ) Got my e-mail setup to where that works properly as well for my domain in which I e-mailed myself and found that it was sending my real name out there which i didnt want and fixed that in e-mail server configuration for my domain.

What I am trying to figure out is, in years past I was sort of sloppy and just had a Linux based Apache Web Server and I had it configured to a Domain Forward from GoDaddy to go to my private web server at IPAddress as issued by ISP:port number and index.html and with the fort forwarding on router all worked perfect except for the fact that the person going there would see a change from www.mywebsite.com to http://10.10.10.69:8077/index.html for example ( 10.10.10.x used  to avoid putting an actual IP to some real location here ). What I want to do is have it remain showing that its www.mywebsite.com

Looking here at link below it looks like it might be an apache configuration but I actually would expect it to be more of a DNS configuration where it would remain masked by DNS server that resolves to the IP address so thats why I'm a little confused with this one. Anyone set up their own web servers able to give info on the correct config to avoid the forward from being seen so that no one would know that they are getting redirected to a private web server and it remains professional looking. To me i would think that i would have to submit to some DNS registry somewhere that then is shared with other DNS's to know that my domain goes to my server and to remain with the domain name in the url bar of the browser vs apache having this control of masking the IP to keep the domain listed instead. 

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16767624/ip-address-is-shown-in-address-bar-instead-of-domain

The website I am starting is a website that promotes free software to show how it can be used to perform various tricks etc. Once I get the website up and running I will be posting how to videos on youtube showing how to use the software as well as at my site also having step by step instructions. I was going through my external hard drive looking to get rid of redundant files to save space and it hit me that there are so many cool software tools out there that are free and it would be fun to show real world application of these FREE ONLY software solutions at one site that people can find and discover other free tools from. I'm not in it to make any money, its just a hobby pretty much. I love computer science and like to help people and like to share information, and sharing of free tools I thought would be cool. I paid $140 for 3 years for all the domains and e-mail, and almost went with a web host service, but realized I could take my netbook that runs on 13 watts of power and use that for starters as a basic apache web server. If traffic starts to get heavy i will then buy into an actual hosting service. Traffic will be very light to my domain for a while and I am hoping to draw attention to it through youtube without spending money on advertising since its not a money making website, its just a free information site that I thought would be cool to get going. For the fact that its not going to be a money maker it doesnt make such sense to go big right at the get go with professional hosting. Videos and all that will be pivoting off of youtube and the webpages are not going to have any flash or anything like that. They are going to be very basic HTML pages with nothing fancy really, but eye appeal in the formatting to be as clean looking yet not an overload of info and also not scarce of it either. The biggest problem would be if it does get attention and traffic, the costs of keeping it going when there is no money making associated with it. I would need approval from all the many people who's software I am voluntarily promoting if I was ever to even have a donation system in place or paid for by advertising which I would like to avoid at all costs because who enjoys going to a website with ads  Legally it seems as though I would need written permission from all the software products owners etc that I voluntarily promote if I was ever to receive any money from random people to cover operating costs otherwise it just seems like it might be in violation of some law of some kind. Such as its ok to have a site that points people to a persons product, who wouldnt want more attention to their product and for free; BUT to have monetary gain even if just to cover operating costs of a website it can be perceived that I am making money using them in some way for myself etc as the best description to what i think could be a problem even if information is freely available online. Their websites would all be shared at my site with links so people can get to the original site of software thats free so I am not going to be acting as an unofficial sub web host server for a mirror of their info etc. Basically its all going to be how to and reviews and by example applications of free and "legal only" software and application of such software solutions.  When doing reviews and there is no money gained and I only praise in promoting someone elses openly free products, i dont see any legal problems with that without permission from them since its no different than anyone online saying go try this guys solution etc. But if my website was ever to be funded through donations or advertising etc, I would think that i'd have to be very careful legally to avoid getting sued for royalties on the money generated as a result of their product drawing traffic to my site since without their software its nothing and has no value. 

If anyone knows of laws to be aware of on sharing of information that is a free for all please share that info here too to be aware of ... ( thinking it falls under public domain as legally a free for all and no problems with doing this as long as not to defame or be negative towards anyones products to be damaging in any way to them in which it could easily be a problem, but when praising a software product basically who wouldnt want more attention brought to their website and their software from my site showing real world applications of their free software. )

[BC_Programmer]

This should all be possible via your DNS Registrar, through "Host Record Management"

You would add an A record with the host "@" and set the value to your IP Address.


To be frank running a website in any capacity from your home Internet is rather, well, dumb.

To start with, most ISP Terms of Service for consumer-level service tiers explicitly forbid running a website from your connection, and even if they are allowed, they are going to be incredibly slow due to the asymmetry between upload and download that is optimal for most consumers.

IP addresses provided by your ISP aren't static, either; they can change with a router reboot, power outage, or any number of reasons, which would cause your website to break. Of course, also, *during* a power outage of any sort where your server is off the site would be down, too.

Additionally, you would probably never see the added traffic that would result in getting cheap webhosting instead of a server in your garage or wherever because the setup would never be capable of anything approaching "volume". It's simply not usable- I did it temporarily when testing Jenkins as our Continuous Integration server and even with only 4 other people looking at Jenkins, my upload bandwidth was pretty much saturated. And in the case of a website, sustained added traffic comes about due to repeat visitors, who are far less likely to come back to your site if they receive a Server Timeout error, or if dealing with your website makes them wonder what Baudrate your modem has. It's sort of like trying to start a grocery store and saying "well, all my product is rotted, but I'll get new inventory when business picks up"

IANAL obviously but royalties, typically, are paid when you license a copyrighted work. Reviewing a product or recommending (or not recommending) a product is not copyright infringement in any way. The only concerns with that would be defamation, like you said- that is, if you intentionally say false things about the authors or the product.

[Geek-9pm]

True confessions. I am a domain junkie. I might have owned over 50 or 60 domains in the past 16 years. Not sure why I have the computation. Anyway, I never got rich and I till have the habit.

Now then, let me say something. I have used both Godaddy and 1And1 , both   both of these are reliable and very good at what they do. Still, I have not used their web-hosting. For some reason I am not comfortable with what there y offer. There are so many, many firms that want to give  you web hosting.

If you like, I can give some more specific things in a Pm that should not go here in the public area. But I will mention just two rules  here.
1 ) If you ever get a good and simple COM name, keep it until you die.
2 ) Avoid have the domain registrar also being your host company.

Of curse, rules are make to be broken. A rule is not a law. The rule is a word of caution. I have to go do something else today. But let me know if you would welcome a PM and later I can give some information that might be interesting.
An kn, I am not going to well your anything. 

[DaveLembke]

Thanks BC for your input on this.

With upload bandwidth, as long as no one is streaming content and content is small in size I didnt think it would be a problem as for as they visit there is an upload until their browser gets all the info that was tied to whatever web page, So if its say 300kb to load the page for jpg images and the HTML content, I didnt think it would be a problem. If people had sessions to a web server i could easily see that being a problem as for the session would have a handshake which consumes bandwidth and adds a load to the server itself to keep the session active. Was thinking it might be ok for a website that has pages that are small and jpg images also small in size. No fancy dynamic content etc all static with just navigation through hyperlinks tucked into a background image such as with use of mapedit and a background that is small in size I was thinking it could look as if its got something heavier in code behind it yet its dirt simple html and small in size.

The part about if I had repeat people coming back and all of a sudden its mud in loading... that is a potential problem if I didnt detect this soon enough to correct for it such as making the leap then to a paid for web host service.

As far as dumb, ... for most purposes hosting your own is illogical these days and could be thought of as being dumb because of bandwidth constraints and modern fancy websites generally need plenty of bandwidth. For most modern web server applications it would be easily crippled and could be termed as dumb. But I was thinking if the HTML was very basic and files associated with it small and links going external to videos elsewhere, I was thinking it might be doable and maybe make sense until I get the kind of traffic in which its time to then switch over to a professional service vs a netbook with Intel Atom CPU sitting idle at 13 watts power draw to send contents on their way to visitors which traffic should be very minimal.

However you got me rethinking now if I will probably just bite the bullet and buy into a short term hosting service and this way I also would get DDoS protection and other benefits of this. This way no idiot targets my server and takes out my internet service along with it as for I'd be wide open for that type of problem. DDoS avoidance requires the right hardware and redundant connections to the web with more bandwidth than your DDoS zombie army hitting you etc.

Thanks for the info and I took no offense to the "Dumb" part and I agree that in most applications it would be rather foolish. Now that I am thinking about the DDoS stuff and how easy it would be for a bozo to DDoS me. I will most likely buy into a short term hosting service tonight and point my domain to their hosting service. Godaddy had some odd pricing last night and I was looking at their packages as, maybe I need to go with someone else to avoid overpaying for a service as for they might not be the best out there for good service and cheap, they might have a gotcha type of pricing that takes advantage of the lazy who dont look for other web hosting options similar to how other businesses stick it to you if you get it all in one place as a convenience yet if you go with a different business just for their service they wont have this convenience premium of getting everything in one place.

I guess if you or anyone else knows of any web hosting services that are decent and less than $5 a month, I'd be interested in checking into those. Godaddy had one package that looked like your allotted to a certain bandwidth of traffic and if you exceed that there might be hidden penalty fees yet that info was hidden somewhere as to how bad is the cost if you go over in bandwidth of traffic.

[BC_Programmer]

Well, just speaking of my own website and Internet connection, I have 150mbps download and 15mbps upload.

A typical page on my site is around 260K, which is around 2 megabits. So, effectively, if i was to host my site from my own home, At best it can accommodate around 7 users at about the same time.

Beyond that, and my upload would be saturated, and website performance suffers. Meanwhile, all the other systems on my network, obviously, have to share all that upload speed, so the performance implications wouldn't just affect users of the web page but also anything using my Internet connection- and the web server would also affect performance of other systems on that network.

Possible TOS violation notwithstanding, that's one of the biggest reasons not to host it yourself- Basically, everything suffers simply in pursuit of saving 3 dollars a month. And ISPs are introducing data caps as well (My own is 1TB which I've never hit thankfully) and over time that *could* incur additional charges- is it worth that to possibly maybe save 3 dollars a month, suffer with reduced network performance in your home, and possibly get 7 or 8 users on your web page retrieving information at the same time.

meanwhile, other computers, phones, etc. still need to use this upload speed- if I want to make changes to the site itself, that's more upload needed, and more impact on performance both for possible users of the site as well as myself and any systems on my network.

And in addition to DDOS considerations (though even VPS services don't usually have any sort of DDOS protection- it's usually something you buy separately through services like Cloudflare) There's the consideration of things like exploits. Networks/LANs usually aren't very secure internally because we usually rely on Network NAT to protect us from things outside our network. You start forwarding ports and offering services available on the Internet at large and suddenly your IP address is getting scanned and detected by crawlers that scan Internet subnets. That get's more intensely scanned and maybe you've got a slightly older version of Apache because you forgot to update. That get's exploited nad now that system is compromised- How secure is your internal network? I know mine is pretty open- if one system was to be compromised there is an established trust between my internal computers that would make it easier to spread, so it might start with an Apache flaw to exploit your server and now they are inside your LAN and can exploit a plethora of other services that are exposed internally like Windows SMB and file sharing, NetBIOS, and countless other services. And run amuck in your internal network.

Low-cost hosting is probably fine for what you want- my old shared hosting was $2.99 a month. I'd argue you'd want to use a CMS instead of slapping static HTML as well- people are quick to judge a page that is too simply designed as being "From the 90's" and might write it off entirely, especially a site claiming to review modern software/hardware.

If a plan has a bandwidth limit, usually reaching that limit means that later visitors get a page describing that the hosting bandwidth was exceeded, rather  than receiving a penalty. You can usually watch/monitor the bandwidth. Even with the shared hosting I had I only came anywhere near my bandwidth limit was when a page on my site was linked on a sharing site.

I started with shared hosting, and when that started to have too much traffic to perform well, I upgraded to a VPS. However I've also never made money from my website either through donations or Ads, and my aim is more to have a place to write stuff or upload content- I experimented with ads and donation stuff but it never really sat right with me so I removed them all completely a few years ago, which itself seems to be the opposite trend for tech-related content which seems to largely lean towards "don't forget to like comment and subscribe, donate to my patreon and my flattr and use my affiliate link for amazon, and here's my paypal donation link so you can encourage me to continue to create these videos that paraphrase wikipedia"

[Geek-9pm]

...
I guess if you or anyone else knows of any web hosting services that are decent and less than $5 a month, I'd be interested in checking into those. Godaddy had one package that looked like your allotted to a certain bandwidth of traffic and if you exceed that there might be hidden penalty fees yet that info was hidden somewhere as to how bad is the cost if you go over in bandwidth of traffic.

If you go to http://www.1and1.com and buy a domain at the regular price, they will give hosting for 99 cents per month. I went for it, kept the domain and stopped the web hosting. I could not understand how the web sit bolder works.  There are a few eBay vendors that will give you $1 a month if you buy a whole year. Sad to say, the majority of them do not last a year.
The standard rate for a good web space is about $2 to $5 a month. But prices vary a lot. It has almost nothing to do with bandwidth. It is about quality, support and stability. Pay less, get less. And that is want I do. I pay less and get less. Just my nature. I hate to pay more, even if it is worth it.

Or, to put it another way, I never pay for that $10 for a wrist-watch. And I do not have any watches that are reliable.

[DaveLembke]

BC and Geek  thank you for all your help with this.

To answer some questions...

BC stated "How secure is your internal network?"

My internal network is way different than most. I have 4 routers. Acting as Level 1, Level 2A, Level 2B, and Level 2C. Level 1 router is the main connected to broadband and it is DD-WRT flashed and highly configured in how to handle the other 3 routers connected to it with QoS and other tricks on how to handle bandwidth as well a my VoIP phone is connected to Level 1 and it too has a QoS allocation rule to make sure that no matter how much bandwidth all Levels and zones consume the phone keeps to a set allocation of bandwidth available to it so it doesnt cut out or act up. Wireless is shut off on this router as well so that I have the strong features of DD-WRT but the wireless security issue is not there at Level 1.

 As long as the DD-WRT router itself isnt compromised no one can watch traffic from Level 2 in zones 2A, 2B, and 2C. No devices on Level 2A, B, or C can connect to each other. They are completely isolated.

Level 2A parallel but isolated to 2B and 2C is my wireless network, so all devices to connect wireless use this such as phones and roku and any visitors wanting to get onto my network with a password that changes when needed.

Level 2B parallel but isolated to 2A and 2C is my hard "wired only" secure network. This is where all computers are located so we can do online purchases and banking etc and all other home computer use that is non-server non-hosting.

Level 2C parallel but isolated to 2A and 2B is where I play around with servers and host stuff for others to connect to such as a long time ago Ventrillo for 5 voice connections for online gaming, UT99 Game Server DeathMatch session hosting, and Linux based Apache Web Server tinkering/use to host my own. If anything is compromised on zone 2C they cant get to 2A or 2B to do any damage and QoS controls at Level 1 router limits maximum bandwidth a system gone rogue can consume, however it doesnt protect from DDoS.

Geek ... I ended up buying into a 3-year host through Hostgator. They had it listed for $2.78 and so I was going to buy into that because they gave me plenty of space and features plus they have that nifty cpanel that you showed me that makes for easy tools to do many things. The funny thing that happened when getting reay to buy into hostgator's plan was that i was half way into the transaction where you put your name and address and get ready to put in credit card info and I went to open up a new tab and check on something first before doing this and they had a script running that was watching the mouse pointers zone of operation to where the minute my mouse pointer left the page and went to open up a new tab all of a sudden a pop up of "Please dont leave us... we will give you an additional 15 cents off a month at $2.63" ... and I was laughing so hard at this. The reason for opening a new tab wasnt that I was going to leave or reconsider their service, I had ADD at times and something popped into my head and I was going to check on it as it was fresh on mind and so i was like SURE!!! I will pay 15 cents less per month and save $5.40 overall just because you panicked that i'd leave and not buy. So I ended up buying into a 3-year hosting service for $2.63 a month and it has 1GB of space which is more than plenty for what I will be doing and $94.68 is what the cost was to me. They could have gotten $100.08 out of me if I didnt go to check out something not related and attempt to open a new tab to browser. Once I had my domain through Godaddy and Hosting through hostgator I then just needed to edit the namespace to point my domain at godaddy to the hostgator nameservers which at first was a pain because it was kind of buried or not clear how to get there until I looked up online how to get there from here etc. I went and used a quick website builder tool they have just to put something there although very incomplete just as a means of being able to enter my website and not get a white page but actually see that everything is working. So all is working and now I just need to go in and build all the content for it which is fun. I plan on only updating it once a week as for I dont have tons of free time to just build and build onto it. Its going to start off small and go from there.

So not going to have my apache server hosting my own. Thank you both for help with this as well as geek for the PM assistance with cpanel and getting my feet wet with that interface through demo. 

[Geek-9pm]

Here is some information that might be helpful to others.
The very low-cost hosting companies out there offer a package called "cpanel", which is an open source program for controlling web site stuff behind the HTML seen by the public. It can assign e-mail, make private FTP directories and install free versions of server-side scripts like WordPress.
Cpanel also can do so limited DNS and re direction for domains.
Look here: (Click on image to enlarge it.)

You can add a domain to your current web space. The new add on domain gets another directory, and can be given a private FTP account.

Why would you need this? Well imagine you got a dumb name like oldman.net and you think you should have used newman.com If the domain can be had, then you can use the sme web space for the better name. That way you don't have to buy more web space for the better name.

Of course, this works when all the domains in a space are owned by the same person. You would not went to share your control panel with another person unless is was your best friend ever. 

I mention this because using cheap service that is poorly managed gives you some freedom at the risk of having a site that  might go down once of month. If you just like to play around, like a hobby, then cheap web hosting might be right for you.
But if you are in a real commercial business, don't do it. 

For what it is worth, the name newman.com is for sale on Godaddy.
I would buy it, but I am already deep into debt and I have got to stop.