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W E B S E R V E R
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SPECIFICATIONS
Hardware: K6-III+ 550 system, 512MB RAM, 80GB of storage.
Operating System: Windows 2000 Server
Web/FTP Server: Internet Information Services 5.0
Internet Connection: Cable - 5.0 Mbs downstream / 512kbs upstream
HISTORY
I always wanted to run a webserver from home but had to wait years for broadband. I figured that I'd use my old 200MMX AST machine running Win98SE and ZBServer. I thought that would be more than enough to handle the load of a home web server. How times change!
By the time I finally got broadband in 2001, I was running W2K Pro on our P-II 400Mhz machine. For about a year and a half, that machine served as our work PC, entertainment PC, web server and internet connection sharer.
Eventually we moved to a new house and had to get a different DSL modem. I decided to install it in our K6-III+ machine running Windows XP and move the internet connection sharing and webserver functions over to it. The P-II machine just wasn't fast enough to run XP, so it continued to run W2K until I upgraded the processor to a P-III 1GHz.
In spring 2003, we made a temporary move prior to moving cross country and only had the P-III machine online. I put the DSL modem back in the P-III machine, which was now running XP. The website ran on that machine for about 4 months.
Once setup in our new home in late 2003, I quickly discovered that the hardware provided by our new DSL ISP would only support one PC. We had PPPoA before, using an internal card which allowed us to use Internet Connection Sharing. We now had PPPoE via an external ZyXel modem/router with one port. What kind of router has only one port?! I bought a Linksys 4 port router/switch with UPnP and put the ZyXel in bridge mode.
Traffic to our site has picked up steadily over the years and the webserver in the pro versions of W2K and XP just don't offer enough concurrent connections. I hacked the IIS metabase to allow 40 connections instead of the default 10 but it just wasn't enough. So, I loaded Windows 2000 Server on the K6-III+ machine. It took a few days to get everything setup, both on the server and the router but it was well worth the effort.
Our system ran in this configuration until October 2004, at which time we moved yet again. This time to a house of our own instead of a rental. Though DSL was available at the new location, it was at a much slower data rate, which wasn't suitable for running our website. They did some checking and troubleshooting and determined that we could get the same data rate we had before but by that time I had already signed up for cable service.
This is the first time I've ever had cable internet service. So far it seems great but I've heard a lot of bad things about it over the years so I'm going to wait awhile before I give it a full thumbs up.
Update: 8/06 - Two years now with cable and I honestly say it rocks.
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COMPUTERS
