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

[Da Rock]

On 12/28/13 12:31, Chris Hill wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Dec 2013, Chris Stankevitz wrote:
>
>> 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).
>
> There are lots of colo providers out there (see 2 below), but I have 
> no personal experience with any of them.
>
>> 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
>
> This is what I do, but I have a static IP. If you have a dynamic IP 
> address, there is a good chance that your contract doesn't allow you 
> to run servers. Your ISP may also block the ports you want, or even 
> all ports but a few. Check your Terms and Conditions.
>
>> 2. Co-location (which I've never done but I think I understand the 
>> concept)
>
> The idea is that you own (or rent) a machine that is physically in a 
> data center somewhere. It "belongs" to you, so you administer it 
> remotely and run what you want.
>
>> 3. Cloud (which I don't understand)
>
> Neither do I. It smells like "new name for an old concept", though.
>
Pretty much :)

You basically rent a vm running FreeBSD on it and can access it via VNC 
or such, so its a bit like a 2 with 1 capabilities. There are variations 
of course...