Quote Originally Posted by N1LAF View Post
Will 1.5Mbps be fast enough?
typically residential DSL is ADSL (where the A stands for Asymetric), so your download bandwidth will be higher than your upload bandwidth. your upload bandwidth will be the upper limit on how fast internet users will be able to get data from your servers. if your blog is low-traffic and you don't have that many readers (and your content is small) then this will be fine, but if you get popular then this will suck big-time.

it sounds like 99main is aiming exactly at consumers like you propose to be ... there is a big difference between providing content and running the infrastructure--most content providers choose, wisely, not to run their own infrastructure for a variety of reasons ... the most important reason, imho, is security: each service you offer this way is, essentially, inviting the public into your home. want to run more services--you're increasing your risk. crackers run software that "walk" through the internet probing hosts which answer at IP numbers for open ports ... once they've identified the open ports (many of which will be on well-known port numbers) the crackers will try to intrude using techniques that are appropriate for the services which are usually open on those ports ...

so: think small now and see how you feel about it all. start with using Dynamic DNS http://www.dyndns.com/ ... sign up for the free service. it's easy to use and, of course, the price is right. this will give you a host name that will (most of the time) map to your dynamic IP address and give you the basis for establishing services that could be used from the internet.

you want a blog site? start at blogspot, blogger, or somewhere similar and see how you feel about keeping a blog in a few months. can you really run a better web server/email server/... than someone who does this for a living?

keep control of the right stuff: make sure you can make changes to your domain name registration and dns service whenever you need to and you can repoint services/names at will.

ok--i've rambled enough.