[Courses] [Domains] Choosing a host

[Mary]

On Sun, Jul 04, 2004, Mary wrote:
>  - you might host your machine non-commercially, for example on your
>  home broadband connection or at yours or a friend's workplace

I forgot to mention in this case that you'll want to make sure of the
following:

 1. That the connection in question has a static IP (some broadband ISPs
 with notionally dynamic IPs are known for allocating new IPs very
 seldom.  In this case, if you can live with the rare changes, this
 might be OK).

 2. That you can host servers on the connection in question

 3. That no commonly used ports that you need are blocked (some home
 ISPs that allow or tolerate servers are now starting to block incoming
 port 25 -- the default SMTP port, and 80 -- HTTP -- is often blocked
 too to discourage web servers)

When you're relying on free hosting from a workplace or a friend, you
will want to be especially careful of security -- I know of one case
where a server buddy-hosted was hacked and turned into a porn and warez
host by the hacker, which ended up costing the host company several tens
of thousands of dollars in bandwidth. Remember that there's a chance
you're exposing your free host to liability for extra bandwidth and for
legal action about the contents of your site and behave accordingly :)

-Mary