my own website?

[Lakshmipathi]

I thinking about having website for my linux activities (for my projects or docs)
what's its physical requirements (intel p4 machine ,AMD etc....)
how i need to spend for it?

and is it possible to earn money from the site?

What are things i need to do for that?

(I can see most LF people have their own websites ...so i love to have
my own site -which will help others )
Any guidance ?

[bigtomrodney]

You can earn money by selling adspace on the site. One of the easiest things to do is to get a Google adsense account or similar. This will put ads on your site and you get paid for people clicking on the ads.

The most important thing is to have a site you are interested in and motivated by. If you aren't that interested then neither will your readers and as a consequence there won't be anyone clicking your ads

[Lakshmipathi]

Thanks bigtomrodney !!! ...how much do i need to spent for Initialize set up(like getting registered domain and other things to consider )
Any personal experience or links on this topic....

[GNU-Fan]

Hello,

I want to discourage you from using ads for a personal website.
Most probably it will just annoy your visitor, will make your website less personal and wont back up your costs anyway.

Of course the cost differ depending on what kind of hosting you want.
The costs of a domain registration are negligible.
Webspace is low-priced as well, Databases usually included.

It only gets costly if you have very much traffic (>1TB/months.)
Or when you want to run a server. But most websites don't.

I pay ~5€/month for my own domain and a VServer and I wouldn't want
any ads to pollute my site just that I get 30cent back.

[bigtomrodney]

GNUfan raises a good point. Often times ads are enough to drive away readers. Sites like thebestpageintheuniverse.net make all of their money from merchandise. The trick is your content has to be worth reading. I guess the crux of it is that if you can't get people reading without ads, you certainly won't get them reading when you do have ads.


Running the site is cheap enough. The domain can be registered for maybe €5 and hosting can often be had at a serious discount for the first year. I think I got my first year with Dreamhost for something like €20. There were huge transfer allowances, probably in the terabytes and 250GB of storage. The downside was that it was a slow service for loading large pages and often uploads took a while. It did the job though.

[Lakshmipathi]

Yes..for past one hour i read about google adsense....
I think i'll stay away from it.

I want the contents to help users.
Recently one of my project won foss india awards and got a sum of
25000/-RS (600 US $)....so i want to use some part this amount to help linux users.

So not worried too much about the revenue the site generates.
The contents ...yes that the most important thing...


I got a doubt ( may be a silly question)I'm having a Home PC (intel p4--256MB ram-40GB HDD) ..is it possible to use or upgrade this machine (install LAMP )and get an domain for it? and use this machine as my site?

or should i contact proper web hosting people regarding this? (because you said about 250GB ....any way do we need such a huge space? )

My intention is to have site ...with Open source projects so users can download it and docs/HOWTO about linux and its commands..

[bigtomrodney]

I got a doubt ( may be a silly question)I'm having a Home PC (intel p4--256MB ram-40GB HDD) ..is it possible to use or upgrade this machine (install LAMP )and get an domain for it? and use this machine as my site?

Yes it certainly is possible, in fact that's the easiest thing to do. You can get a dynamic dns address from dyndns.com for free and test this. The trick is if you don't have a fast internet connection this isn't really workable. Also remember that with ADSL down speeds are great but up are terrrible.

or should i contact proper web hosting people regarding this? (because you said about 250GB ....any way do we need such a huge space? )

If hosting it at home doesn't suit it is relatively cheap to get good supported hosting. I wouldn't worry about the 205GB...you're not paying for it, it is just a marketing trick. I'd say it'd take you a year to upload it anyway

[GNU-Fan]

Hello,

don't know how the situation is like on the other side of the marble but here in Central Europe is happens to be cheaper to pay the monthly rent for a rootserver from a hoster. Some allow to bring your own machine and plug it into their server room but the monthly fee for power/connection is more than in an all-inclusive package. And they care about hardware defects etc. also.

To let the computer serve from my home internet connection is also no good idea.

You have to ask yourself how much control do you need to have over the server. I do not see why you would want to pay so much when you just want to host a website.

[fingal]

I want the contents to help users.

That's a great reason to start a website. I speak as someone who has tried and failed to begin a handful of sites... To echo BigTom, you have to be enthusiastic and make sure your site content is helpful... Good luck with your site!

[Lakshmipathi]

Thank you all your valuable inputs ...i'll come up with more updates on my site soon...