Running FreeBSD for my personal website: collocation, cloud, etc.

[Erich Dollansky]

Hi,

On Fri, 27 Dec 2013 18:22:47 -0800
Chris Stankevitz <chrisstankevitz at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've used linux for years but the BSD Now podcast has me fired up
> about BSD.  I'm thinking of resurrecting my domain name web and mail
> servers with FreeBSD.
> 
> Can you recommend a place/procedure by which I can easily (and
> cheaply) get up and running with a "publicly accessible" FreeBSD
> machine connected to the internet on which I can run a web and mail
> server?  Maybe I'll hookup a VPN for use when I am on a public
> connection (e.g. starbucks).
> 
> The server will be under essentially no load.
> 
> The way I see it I have these options:
> 
> 1. Buy and run machines from home and figure out a scheme to deal with
> my dynamic ip address
> 
use this for a start.

After you got this running and you are sure you can handle FreeBSD
from a remote place, you can move to option 2.

Why? There are some pitfalls in FreeBSD a beginner could be trapped in
if the machine is remote.

I did this before. If I remember right, I used dyndns.org to handle the
change of IP address.

> 2. Co-location (which I've never done but I think I understand the
> concept)
> 
If you have a full machine, there is no difference to your machine at
home except that you have to pay for your errors when things go wrong
and can't be fix via a remote connection.

> 3. Cloud (which I don't understand)

This should not be much different from 2. from the outside point of
few. Of course, you should have tools at hand which will enable you to
restart from scratch if you killed the installation. Performance is
lower as 2. but this would not matter in most cases.

Erich