This website, amongst others that I run, is being served from my home of a 8Mbps ADSL line with Freedom2Surf. Actual speed is 4.7Mbps Download and 768Kbps Upload.

For a webserver, the Upload speed is the most important contributing factor, as this is how fast you can access my pages.

For a site that is mostly text with a few graphics, it can cope quite well, but there are important points to consider when setting up your system:

Get a good router that also offers QOS (Quality of Service) such as the one I use, which is the Draytek 2800VG.

QOS allows you to control the Vlan of the router, so that your webserver can only "hog" 25% of your internet connection. This is important, so that if you are getting a lot of visits and they are going through your photo gallery, you will not get affected whilst you yourself are browsing the internet.

I, for example use the 2800VG for all my national and International calls over VOIP (Voice over IP), having sent my family members in Italy a Vigortalk unit, allowing us to spend as much time as we like on the International calls for free.

I also listen to my favorite radio stations with my Internet Radio, so this and browsing the internet would be heavily effected if I had not had the possibility of "throttling" my Webservers access.

About the Webserver:

Requirements:

• Silent
• SFF (Small Form Factor)
• Low energy consumption
• Windows XP O/S (so that I can also run Skype, Internet Radio etc... 24/7. Also it is easy to run Linux apps on a Windows box, but the opposite is far more difficult.)
• Low cost unit
• Easy control panel (for quick adjustments)
• Ability to run Linux apps.

Originally, I was running a Linux server 24/7 out of the garden shed, but found the need to run more and more devices attached to a PC in the house, so a Windows upgrade to the server was required, not easy to do on a budget, as anything Windows usually has a price tag attached to it, whereas the Linux community is big enough to find all tools like stats software for free.

WIP 19/06/2006