I've set up a website (hosted on my broadband machine at home) for a one man joinery, cabinet making and furniture business in the Buxton, Derbyshire. I'd like to get it up the ranks on a google search for say 'High Peak Joinery' or 'Buxton Joinery'
the site is
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there any sites out there the might be relevant to this sort of thing so that I could approach them for adding a link to my site? I believe this will have a positive effect on google listings
Is it slow/medium/fast loading? It's run from home (on this machine in fact) on a 600Mhz ITX machine on a basic broadband connection. dread to think what it'd be like if more than one person was trying to browse at the same time...:-) Although it looks like that's what's happening at the mo.
stockbroker belt will buy all you can make ! I'm still waiting for a local cabinet maker to visit to measure up and quote for some furniture from 21 months ago.
The site is nice and responsive at the moment. I love some of the pieces on it although I imagine my current financial position means I won't be buying any off you in the near future :-).
I run a couple of websites off my broadband connection one of which is moderately popular (10000+ unique visitors a month viewing 22000+ pages).
I have found that ADSL has much lower latency than cable which produces a snappier site. If you find that your site is sucking to much bandwidth (I wouldn't have thought it would in the near future) and you want to keep the site running locally consider moving the images off onto a remote server.
Concurrency (multiple visitors at the same time) can be an issue on broadband connections although most connections should be able handle 2 or 3 concurrent visitors. If you find that you are getting concurrency issues you can tweak Apaches settings to allow only a couple of users at a time, YMMV though. I would switch over to Linux but then I'm a zealot :o)
I'm good and having bought the machinery I'm quick too. (end of brag)
Where are you? I can always give you a quote
Graham:
How do you move the pictures to a remote server? My ADSL connection is supposed to come with 1gig of webspace so I could serve the site and the text from here and have the pics there...but how do you do it?
I'm near Kettlehulme. Due to needs-must, we ended up getting some Wickes stuff for now but do intend to get something more in keeping with the building later. I'll certainly ask you to quote.
Why not just put everything up on the ISP's server and just post enquiries to your machine. A little easier than splitting the site across two IP addresses as it will be explained how on your ISP's website. This way there's also no problem with multiple accesses or if you go down.
Your ISP probably has tools or at least info on how to do this. FTP is the normal protocol for uploading to your ISP provided webspace. Ws-FTP is a good tool to transfer whole directories at a time. Some of the fancier web page design tools have an uploader built in. If you want to keep the text on a server at home (unusual) you would have to learn a lot more about html nuts and bolts
As a couple of other people have mentioned it is possibly easier to just use the web space your ISP offers if all you are going to do is display static web pages. Your ISP doesn't offer any (decent) server side tools (only some bits of CGI) with your account* which is a shame because you could have done a lot if they had offered PHP. The other downside of completely hosting your site with them (under your existing account at least) is that it will then have the address
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which isn't IMHO as professional looking as the address you have now. You could of course purchase one of their hosting packages but then that is more expense when you can do it for free.
To host your images remotely simply insert complete URLs into the src part of your image tags eg Where you currently you have:
Convert to:
Then use an intelligent FTP client to synchronize your images with the off site server. It's a bit trickier to manage and wouldn't be worth it until you are burning through a ton of bandwidth (5GB/month at least) on your ADSL (if you switch to Linux you could use rsync + cron but lets not go there now). There is only one very slight downside to this (it really is very slight but for completeness I should mention it) some people block images that aren't loaded from the originating website.
If you choose to continue hosting it yourself (and I heartily recommend it if you aren't afraid to learn a bit about the software you will be using) pick up a book on PHP so that you can do some server side processing. Even a little bit of dynamic content can make a website come alive. Hosting it yourself means that you don't have to pay for features like databases (should you ever need one - postgres and mysql both run on windows and are free) and discussion forums (should you ever want one
- phpbb is very popular).
I believe you are with zen.co.uk and assume you are on their Home 500 service or similar.
You minght find it a little reassuring to know that I found when doing some testing with JMeter on some of our sites, you can run 10 to 15 concurrent users against a site, and it still remain useable (just) when hosted on ADSL with 256K uplink.
You can circumvent that by using "framed forwarding". This basically just hosting a frameset on your current server, that then loads the actual site from the ISPs free web space server into a frame. That way you will still be able to control what domain will be seen in the title bar.
Hardly a very professional approach and if will confuse the hell out of search engines. At best you will end up listed with the wrong address if the search engine can handle it at all. No site that uses frames gets a good listing.
Then of course there is the problem with bookmarks. When someone bookmarks a page on a site like this they will actually get either the URL of the real page, which defeats the point of framing, or they URL of the root of the site (the frame set) which means their bookmark probably won't point at what they intended it to point at.
A redirect would certainly work but it doesn't overcome the fact that the site would have the wrong address. Ok the first page would his domain name but the rest of the pages would all appear under the free web space. Spiders would list them under the free web space address as well making the domain practically pointless (Google in particular isn't fooled by redirects and won't list a site that is nothing but a redirect).
The last cheap package I went for was down more than it was up then ran off with my money. I had a look at the link you suggested though - they do offer some pretty good deals as long as they actually supply.
I second that. Make user your mail server is locked down good and tight. It will be attacked left right and centre.
I do find that very reassuring. I didn't realize and ADSL would handle that many concurrent connections (although I would be interested to know more about the test conditions). I doubt I have had that many people at my main site at the same time - yet.
I don't find serving pages to be a problem it's the big files that kill the link because one person with an ADSL the other end can saturate the upstream. I try and move any large files (>1MB) off site where possible.
I host myself because one of my sites needs decent quality (and cheap at the minute) tomcat + postgres access which last time I checked doesn't exist. Yeah, I could get it if I was willing to pay and arm and a leg but it's not making much money at the moment so doesn't warrant it.
Ther is no limit on the number of cncurrent conectiosn on any link. Its merely a speed issue. Or sometimes teh ability of teh software to actually maage teh tables associated with several thousand concurrent users. A decent linux box should be able to handle a few tens of thousands.
Spoeed though is a issue.
Have a look at
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They have some pretty refined shared servers.
I agree that paying 11 grands a year to stick YOUR box in THEIR rack is excessive..
While I agree from a technical point of view with what you are saying the realistic concurrency limit on an average ADSL connection is, I suspect, somewhere between 5 and 10 (assuming simple HTML pages are being served with a couple of jpgs + pngs). You can keep adding more connections but nobody will wait the 3 hours required to get the page (in fact I image you would get a time-out somewhere along the line before you got the page) so your site is for all intents and purposes down.
From watching the slashdot effect it would seem the best way to deal with a very large number of users on limited bandwidth is to make the turn around as fast as possible and turn off http-keep-alive. It was long thought that you could beat a good slashdotting using bandwidth alone but people found that slow servers connected to a big fat pipe still died because they ran out of sockets.
IMHO, by the time you are regularly hitting 10 concurrent connections though you are probably at the realms of pay for hosting anyway because you should be making enough money off your site to pay for it.
What I have been looking at is possibly using a cheap VPS. Whack Debian on it, install any software you want, burn through your bandwidth.
Test conditions were for a financial product search and comparison site we had developed. The test server was running Apache with Tomcat, and MySQL, all on the same laptop PC with a 400MHz PIII processor running win2K. Client end was a Athlon XP 2000+ (winXP), with a PIII 850MHz win2k slave both running JMeter on a 1Mb/256K ADSL link.
The test case was built by recording a simulated user session, who came into the site, progressed through the data input pages, calling up a help page from time to time, went through the search process (fairly complex MySQL queries), to a result page, then drilled down to individual products from the results, and selected generation of a PDF report on some of the products (the delivery of the PDFs being the biggest bandwidth hog).
The test run involved say 10 sessions being run against the server, with the sessions being started at a random interval within a 3 minute initial window (each session takes about 5 mins to complete), so at the peak all sessions were running concurrently. JMeter monitors the page response times. What we saw was the page response went from a worst case of say 0.4 secs on a single user, to perhaps 15 secs for some pages at maximum load. While not that snappy, it was still holding up and not dropping pages. The major limit on delivery was as much the slow hard drive in the laptop as the 256K uplink.
Yup big files will be more of a problem. You might find it worthwhile including some traffic shaping on the server to prevent any one connection saturating the link in that way.
(We developed another product years ago that would allow a remote user to connect and synchronise their copy of a large database that was updated centrally. Depending on how many days since they last connected the compressed difference files could be getting up to several hundred K or more. We had to implement a connect limit of no more than 5 concurrent users, otherwise our server process would completely saturate the 2Mb/sec connection that the end user had, which was supposed to serve the internet access needs of the whole company!)
Yup, I know that problem - finding a low cost host that will also do Tomcat (or give you enough control to install it yourself) was very difficult. We found one that seemed reasonable (two accounts on two servers complete with load balancing etc), but the backup and support from the provider was non existent. So when it all fell over a couple of days before the service was due to be going live, and it was impossible to get hold of the people running the outfit for days on end we had to make alternative arrangements PDQ. In the end we ended up renting a collocated server all to ourself from a big commercial hosting company at ten times the original cost!
Its a workable way forward in many cases so long as you do not need to meet any guaranteed uptime commitments (because your ADSL contract does not typically have a matching guarantee you can't really rely on it).
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