Co-Location, Dedicated and In-House Hosting

Co-Location Hosting

Many ISPs and Hosting providers can also offer a type of hosting known as co-location; a service whereby a webserver and routing equipment can be bought and housed in the hosting companies air conditioned building. Multiple IPs, extra bandwidth etc., can be purchased also. With Co-Location you are responsible for your machine. Any hardware failures will have to be resolved by you or you pay support staff to work it out.

With Co-Location you are in control of all elements of your webserver. You install, configure and control what services you want on the machine from your office or remote location.

Dedicated Servers

On the other hand you could consider a dedicated server, which would be housed at the providers offices and would be managed by the hosting company staff. Hardware, OS and module installation and upgrades are carried out and the machine maintained by their support staff. In general you should still be able to maintain root access to your server and do whatever you want with it. Dedicated servers are leased usually at a per month cost.

In-House

With the right technical knowledge it is entirely possible to host your Website from a server in your office or home.

If you have an ADSL connection, Cable or other fixed line, and a static IP address, you can easily set up a machine with Webserver software. It's actually possible to set up Apache on a Windows machine (see resources) to serve your webpages.

With 2 or more machines on a network you will probably need a router to send and receive requests for your server. That way you can set one machine up as a Unix, Linux, FreeBSD (a flavor of Unix), or even Microsoft server and have other machines free for work/play.

*Nix and FreeBSD operating systems are open source and free to download and install. You may need some guidance to install, configure and run these systems and the modules you will need. However there are a number of excellent resources for *Nix and BSD OS as well as modules for MySQL, PHP and Perl etc...

There are also a number of quality 3rd party control panels which you can install so that you can administer your webserver from any computer, wherever you are.