Ask HN: How to host a website out of my garage?

First things first, it depends if you care about breaching the Terms of Service of your ISP. 99% of them include a "No Servers" or similar clause and require you to purchase a Business Line instead of a Personal Line from them. Most of them don't really care if it's non-commercial but some do.

Relevant clauses from multiple USA ISP's (scroll down a little) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/google-fiber-continues...

Aside from issues you may run into with your ISP not wanting you to run servers off of a residential connection (check your terms of use), connectivity from the outside world to your home is not going to be nearly as good as if you have a server hosted in a data center.

A typical data center will have multiple high-capacity backbones connecting their building to the internet which not only means better connections between your server and those connecting to it, but greater reliability and redundancy.

First check if your ISP blocks port 80. Unless your router is bridged, you need to open up the fire-wall for incoming traffic on port 80. You will most likely find this under "Game & Application Sharing" or "Port Forwarding / Port Triggering" in your router's admin interface. Try forwarding port 80 to your work-station, install node.js and run the HTTP-server-example. Then ask a friend if he/she can connect to your IP via the browser.

When you got port-80 working, you need some hardware: A cheap server and a cable to connect it to the router. An old laptop will do as server (KVM and UPS for free).

You also need to decide what software to run, I would go with Ubuntu server as it's the most friendly. Create a bootable USB-stick.

Setup SSH so that you can access the server from your work-station/laptop.

Signup to a DNS service and point a domain name to your IP.

I do this.

I have a a switch, servers plug into that. I have static IP's. I have UPS's and separate electrical service for this. I also have a few rack mount AC units.

Comcast -> PfSense box -> Servers. I run CentOS.

PS: I also watched that episode. Did you notice the cabinet with SUN x'd out?

So you could run services on the end of your residential xDSL or cable line. Getting multiple IP addresses from your ISP makes it easier (good luck with that!), but you could just set up port forwarding from your router. That would technically 'work', but...

With any volume of connections, your cheap residential router will fall over under the load. xDSL and cable are both asymmetrical, so you don't have much upload bandwidth, and cheap ISPs frequently have 'no servers' clauses in their terms of service. The reliability isn't great, either. A business xDSL or cable service will fix the terms of service issue, and possibly get you a more reliable service, but isn't going to do much for the upload bandwidth.

You could get a leased-line type connection, which these days are generally delivered as Ethernet over optical fibre or Ethernet-in-the-First-Mile, which is a VDSL-ish symmetrical service. That's going to cost at least an order of magnitude more than cable or xDSL, and unless your garage happens to be located in a business district, you'll probably also have to pay for them to dig up the street and extend the network to you.

With either of those routes, your garage won't have redundant connections to the Internet, won't have redundant power or cooling (does it even have cooling to begin with?), a staffed NOC, or all the other things which go with a proper datacentre.

Cloud and dedicated hosting is so cheap these days that for anything more than a hobby project, I wouldn't even consider running a server from home -- and it's very questionable, even for the hobby projects!

> I'm assuming it's a more work than just connecting your local router up to the servers right?

Not really, assuming what you are trying to do isn't being subverted by your ISP.

That being said, cloud hosting is a race to the bottom in terms of cost - I wouldn't host locally ever again.

Colocation is also pretty cheap (I've seen ~$30-40/mo 1U w/ capped gigabit connections/no real power constraints, locally)

Along the Terms of Service line. Don't forget that most ISP's even if you have a business account can/will limit what type of things you can do. For example, if you dream of being the next porn king site from your garage, prepare to be shutdown fairly quickly, it violates most ToS. Also, bulk email and video hosting will generally violate the ToS too.

Most of the clients I run into anymore that really want to host their own is because they are being told no by co-location facilities or other providers because of content or usage restrictions. The other's are generally security concerned, but maybe don't understand all the work and repeated work that goes into hosting a secure server/service on the Internet, between network security, firewall rules, server patching etc.

Not saying don't just make sure your reasons won't get vetoed by the ISP.

I'd recommend a Synology NAS which gives you your own private cloud. You can install lots of different apps and platforms and has dynamic DNS support out of the box. You also get other cool NAS benefits like DNLA and a bunch of apps for iOS and Android as well (I think)

I did this for a while, my ISP had a reasonable rate for a business connection so I had no blocked ports. The issue I ran into was uptime. There were a lot more little outages and unexplained speed issues than would have been acceptable in a datacenter.