A great webserver is nothing
without great content to serve. Let me emphasize that a home webserver
running on DSL or Cable modem should not be used for mission critical business.
Special interest websites that can afford to be down once in a while are
better suited for this type of setup.
The type of website you are
considering running in part determines the other aspects of your webserver
(connection speed, CPU speed, etc). Here are a few guidelines on what you
should concentrate on for each particular setup, but remember, it's fairly
flexible.
-
Basic personal home page - nothing
special
-
FTP file server - fast connection
speed
-
Streaming media - fast connection
speed
-
CGI scripts - fast CPU speed
-
Active server pages - fast CPU
speed
-
Game server - fast connection
speed & fast CPU speed
As you can see, different types
of webpages have different needs. In general, it is good to make your webserver
powerful and robust enough to handle a bit of everything.
In the case of DSLwebserver.com,
our webserver has to serve up mainly static webpages, which is not CPU
intensive at all. Some of the larger graphics on this website may take
a while to load but shouldn't be too slow in most cases. The online
forums are a concern because they run CGI scripts which require much
more CPU cycles. For example, when a user performs a search in the forums,
I routinely see the CPU usage approach 50%. When the server is serving
static html pages, the CPU usage does not exceed 2%. So for DSLwebserver.com
I needed a fairly fast CPU and that's about it.
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