Home-based server for hosting a ColdFusion website

[paul_8809]

I just heard of a guy who ran his website from a computer at home and thus avoided having to deal with the issues of shared hosting. Apparently it worked great for him. Has anyone done this before and what would be involved for a coldfusion website? 

[Dave Watts]

I've run CF servers from my office. You can run a dedicated CF server from many ISPs or hosting providers. So, yeah, kinda? When it works, it's good. When you have a hardware problem, it can be ... less good. I'm sure you can get dedicated hardware from most cloud providers today. But you'll be responsible for purchasing the software and hardware, and usually managing it too. In addition to managing the servers themselves, you'll have to manage everything your servers need: firewall,  backup, logs, resource allocation for usage spikes, user and group management, remote access, etc. If anything goes wrong, you'll have to solve it as quickly as possible. You'll have to learn every part of the stack: web server, CF, database, TCP/IP networking, firewall, general server management, hardware diagnostics and repair, etc. It's a lot of work, I can assure you. But you might enjoy it; I did.

[Ryan @ xByte Cloud]

@Dave Watts - Amazing list of the tech stack needed to host a website and honest answer about the amount of work to host something yourself.  Something I can add is staying up to date on the security updates for all software and hardware you are using.  I just talked with someone who got hit with a zero day exploit of a firewall a year ago.  They had staff supporting their servers, but imagine if it's only 1 person.  You may not know about the exploit and then you have someone in your network for months or years doing anything they want without you knowing.  Another story for you, we just mograted someone to our xByte Cloud from another provider.  They had someone in their server for years getting credit card information.  The other provider didn't lock down certain areas and that allowed the hacker to add their own webpage through a form on the website and that then created a backdoor.  We discovered it and went through a deep investigation to make sure we removed it and made sure everything was secured.  

While I regularly warn about the shortcomings of shared hosting - if you have a website that handles any kind of sensitive information or even logins, I would recommend it over hosting it yourself.  Only caveat is that you need to use a hosting provider that knows what they are doing.  If you just have a blog or some kind of website that just displays information, then there is less security risk.  If you do go down that road, then make sure it is separate from the rest of your network so you don't allow a back door into more of your data.

[Dave Watts]

I enjoyed learning the stack, but I wouldn't want to do it today. Everything is more complicated. I recently worked on a (non-CF) project for a large org without any sensitive info or authentication that involved a dedicated cloud vendor and a top-tier CDN ... and still, STILL there were problems. I think that between the three teams - us as the contractors, the cloud vendor, the CDN vendor - we had probably ten people regularly involved. Yecch. When I started, it was a lot different, that's for sure.

[Ryan @ xByte Cloud]

With Google expecting sub 3 second page load times on a mobile 4G phones and penalizing slower sites, there is a level of tuning across the entire stack that was not required before.