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The evolution of DSL lines and technologies such as FTTH has make me wonder if traditional hosting services could be in danger.

If you want to host your own domain, for example for a blog or a simple business page, setting up a webserver (with some interesting options, such as FTP, printing and even email) is each day more affordable and interesting.

In fact, here in Spain we're starting to see FTTH lines with a 50Mbbps/5Mbps download/upload channels, and I think 5 Mbps is in fact a really good bandwidth if users want to access the server and you're not Facebook.

My question is, apart from the technical issues (I guess most readers at SF would know how to set up a webserver and a blog, for example), is there some way to know how much bandwidth can handle this kind of setup with a 5 Mbps upload channel?

How many concurrent users (aided with a good Nginx/PHP-FPM/Varnish/Memcached config, for exxample), and how many unique visitors/day could that server and Internet connection handle?

Disclaimer: this question was first asked on ServerFault, but I didn't new that there can be no questions about personal servers there.

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There are to many unknowns to be able to answer this question. Depends among other things on 1) how much data you want to serv (how big are your pages) 2) how many simultaneous connection your ISP allows for a non buissness user 3) how good you are at setting up your server. But what you are really paying for on a commercial hosting is reliability. – Nifle Nov 15 '11 at 12:45
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My suggestion is to just do it. And when/if your website is too successful for your DSL connection move it or upgrade your connection. – Nifle Nov 15 '11 at 12:46
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as I said on SF ...running a server at home is Generally A Bad Idea, regardless of connection.. The line probably would be good enough but the only really good way it set it up and benchmark it. – tombull89 Nov 15 '11 at 12:48
Question: Do you have 5 Mbps all day or does it decrease during peak hours? Because you will have most visitors at peak hours. – Dennis Nov 15 '11 at 12:58
Commercial hosting also adds a huge amout of redundancy over a home 'webserver', usually from virtualisation. Actual overheads (power, bandwidth per mb, 'processing' power) are a huge amount lower through this virtualisation (due to the hosts volume) than anything a home or small business user can even come close to :) – HaydnWVN Nov 15 '11 at 13:06
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closed as too localized by Nifle, tombull89, techie007, slhck, Gareth Nov 15 '11 at 13:17

This question is unlikely to ever help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet. See the FAQ for guidance on how to improve it.

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Home connections have no SLA so you are at the mercy of your ISP. Hosting provides you the ability to sleep at night not worring about infrastructure, cooling, routing, etc. which all fall in your lap when you host yourself.

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I wouldn't use this for critical services. I was talking a personal blog, maybe a photo gallery, mail server, a little diaspora pod or an owncloud little repo... these sort of things. – javipas Nov 15 '11 at 14:48
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