Updated: November
16, 2001
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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