Hosting a site from your pc

[JJ9867]

I have an question.

What is the minnimum bandwith you really need to host a site? Has anyone tried to host a site through their dsl connection?

[pyro]

I've not tried it, but if your site is going to be reciving any number of hits, or doing any amount of data transfer, DSL is not the way to go...

[toicontien]

I've read an article about this very subject, I believe it was in the ISP Planet newsletter but don't remember.

There are some cities that are providing/planning Very high bit-rate DSL, or VDSL. It's only available if you're within 2,000 feet of a DSLAM though, but at the time companies wanted to offer VDSL speeds at multi-megabit levels, i.e. multiple T-1s. Some experts even argued that a 1.1 mb/sec DSL connection could be enough, but mostly for low volume sites. The biggest drawback with DSL is that it's a little less reliable than a T-1 or fiber optic connection. You may experience more down time with DSL.

The upside is that DSL is cheaper per month for the same speeds, as long as you have a provider who wants to actually give you all the bandwidth you're paying for. My parents have a 738k DSL residential connection thru TDS, their local telco and I've rarely, RARELY seen speeds above 300k. I can't stress RARELY enough. But that's just general web surfing and downloading files off of download.com and other web sites. I downloaded Mozilla one night at their house and was scoring over 1 mega byte per second. Chalk that up to the server you're connecting to.

You're more likely to get better performance from a dedicated fiber optic or T-1 type connection, bar none.

In short, it's possible to host a web site off of DSL. Just make sure it's a low traffic site, or else you may see performance problems on the site. And you'll want SDSL so your upload and download speeds are the same.

For the money spent per month on SDSL thru most providers, you can score a pretty good web hosting deal with a company that uses a fiber optic backbone, and one with redundancy.