Self-hosting How-to?

[indy-pc]

With the recent death of LMI free, I have been looking into an alternative. I have been testing out ScreenConnect and I have been pretty pleased and impressed so far. One feature that I hadn't given much thought to at the time was the fact that it is a self-hosted solution. I know very little about web hosting, virtual servers or any number of other related topics to be honest. So, I'm turning to my fellow Technibblers for some guidance in the right direction.

I'm a mobile, one-man tech and I operate out of my home with a non-business Comcast cable internet service (dynamic IP). I have my website hosted on GoDaddy and the design template is from the Podnutz Tech Site Builder 2.0 setup. I wouldn't know where to begin on trying to design my own website, set it up, write the code or make any fundamental changes beyond "use this file as the logo" type of change.

What I would like to know is how I could go about hosting my website, SC and maybe even look into buying PCRT sometime soon. But, I don't know how. I'm quite capable of using Google, but I don't want to spend days or weeks pouring over useless/outdated information.

Would anyone here know of some quality resources I can read/watch to get me started?

 

[Xander]

I'm self-hosting my SC (my website w/PCRT is via Godaddy). Software doesn't demand much so there's no problems as far as resources go. I set up a forwarder through DlinkDDNS.com (my IP rarely changes so I just refresh it through their site if it ever does), port forwarding on my router and...that's about it.

 

[Markverhyden]

I've been doing something like what you are looking at since '06 or so.

I do not yet have a website but I have had my email and FTP since the beginning. I added Calendar and Address Book (Apple) about 3 years ago. Owncloud about 1.5 years ago. I also have a DHCP account with Charter.

To address the FQDN and DHCP ip address thing you use a Dynamic DNS service. I've used zoneedit.com, which allows for your own FQDN, the whole time for dynamic dns and have never had an issue. There are a number of agents out there that will update zoneedit with any IP address changes.

Most of the other dyndns services have you make a subdomain off of their domain which is not very professional in my opinion.

You don't need to move your website from google when you test this. But you will have to move your all your DNS records from google to zoneedit. ZE is not free but it's pretty cheap. I think something like $12/yr for one root FQDN. You can add all the subdomains you want. Point the regular website dns record back to google.

Zoneedit has a lot of good information. In fact I think that was all I looked at when I set mine up.

 

[Xander]

Most of the other dyndns services have you make a subdomain off of their domain which is not very professional in my opinion.

Agreed - that's why mine is shown in an iframe on my remote support site (which is just a DNS-masked sub-page of my regular site)

 

[indy-pc]

Thanks for the information. I do appreciate it. I'm looking to self-educate myself on these things, but mostly how to actually do it. I have FreeDNS in place for SC to update my IP if it ever changes. As you mentioned, though, I am using a rather unprofessional domain (indy-pc.remote.mx) for it at the moment. Eventually, I'll want to change that.

I guess I should have been more clear on what I'm looking to do. I would like to host my website, mail server, SC, PCRT and who knows whatever else. What I don't really understand is how to do that. Would I need a separate machine for each or could I use a virtual server? How would I setup/install a virtual server? What software or OSes would I need? Will I need any other equipment such as switch or business-class router (I currently have an ASUS rt-ac68u). Would I NEED a static IP or is it just preferred? What would be an ideal setup for a one-man show, a small shop and a thriving company? What things should I look out for or be aware of before I start?

Like I said before, I know very little at this point and I don't mind doing the leg work. But, I would appreciate some guidance and direction of resources to use rather than sifting through countless Google search results.

 

[Markverhyden]

Well I guess it's a matter of what OS and whether you believe them. M$ basically claims that you should only use one box per role. So with 4 roles, Web, mail, SC, PCRT, in theory you should have 4 servers, not including a Domain if you want that.

Personally I think that is bull but with M$ you never can predict what will happen if something goes wrong.

I use a Fedora Core machine for my email and ftp. Email is Axigen (from the beginning) and ftp is vstfp. By the way that machine is a old Dell Dimension 8200, P4 1.8 GHz, 1GB RAM. Try that with a M$ Server OS.

I'm testing SC on my Mac server, just because, but will run it in production mode on the same FC machine if that is the direction I go in. When ever I get to doing my website I'll most likely put it on my Mac server since it is so easy to manage.

If you are set on M$ only I'd recommend you think about going the VM route. You can pickup really nice servers on fleabay. I bought myself a Dell R710 with 5 x 300gb SAS drive and bumped up the RAM to 48 GB. Probably cost a total of $2k when I was done. You would have no problem running 4 windows server VM's on that if the traffic is low. Mine is setup with ESXi on bare metal and everything on top of that. At I'll probably migrate my FC machine to that in the near future

 

[allstarit]

I purchased a Plesk 11 VPS and installed screen connect on it, host my website and clients websites and 3CX server.

Work really well and only costs me $49 per month which is pretty good when you consider paying indvidually for each service. Just gotta ensure you have enough ram and disk space. Alot of the cheaper VPS's lack ram and CPU so you loose performance especially on webhosting side of it. Good thing about virtual servers you can upgrade diskspace, ram and CPU easily and add more IPs.

 

[allstarit]

I also use this as a remote server with Outlook and some documents shared through Google Drive. I also have hosted exchange through a local ISP and setup outlook for my emails.