Roll Your Own Webserver – Part 1

I’ve been running a webserver from my house for about 7 years now. I started with a PowerMac 6100 (pizza box), and later moved up to an el-cheapo hamfest special ($10.00) PowerMac 7500. I later upgraded that with a Sonnet G3 processor, and now am using a 1.25 GHz G4 Mac mini.

What website? I host the “official” Grinnell Family Association of America website at www.grinnellfamily.org from my computer room. It’s a genealogically-oriented site with a searchable database containing over 30,000 names and around 10,000 families, all connected to our progenitors, Matthew and Rose Greenell of Lexden, England. The printed book that will be derived from this database will run upwards of 1,500 pages, or at least that’s the current estimate. I’ll deal with the genealogy side of things in future blogs. For now, I want to concentrate on the server part of the equation.

First, let’s look at hardware. Please plan on running your webserver on a separate machine from your regular home machine(s). The reasons include performance and most of all, security. You really need to keep your webserver isolated from the rest of your network. This process will be described in a future blog. If you want to use a Mac, the first thing you need to decide upon is old(er) hardware or new(er) hardware. Like I said at the start, my site initially ran on a very elderly PowerMac 6100. With a genteel 66 MHz 601 processor, this kind of machine won’t get out of its own way for most normal uses, but as a small home-based webserver with static HTML pages, if you don’t plan on huge numbers of hits per day, it will really do an amazingly adequate job. Consider this: most broadband hookups can only provide between 128 and 256 kilobits/second on the uplink (when people request HTML pages and content from your machine, you are uploading to the net), so it won’t take much to fill that pipe. Other great machines in the older category include the highly reliable PowerMac 7500/8500/9500 family. These can be easily upgraded for less than $100 to a 500 MHz G3 processors from Sonnet and others. Storage may be a problem, as SCSI hard disks are getting tougher to find, but hey, how about the early G3 (beige) towers and desktops? They use more easily obtainable (and cheaper) ATA (IDE) hard drives. Used prices for those machines are well into the toilet. You can put 768 MB of RAM into them relatively cheaply, too.

Any of these machines will work well with Mac OS 9.2, which comes with a combination extension and control panel, “Personal Web Sharing” (PWS). It’s easy to set up, too. What I don’t know is how “hackable” this software is–that is, I don’t know if is it sufficiently secure in this modern day and age. Remember, PWS was written in the mid-late 90s when security wasn’t the concern it is now. All I can say is you should have all your webserver data backed up to a separate drive if you use this (or any) solution. That caution aside, PWS is a great way to cheaply throw together a web server with an old and otherwise unwanted Mac.

Want to use more modern hardware with OS X? The good news is that Mac OS X comes with the best webserver software on the planet, and it’s free, too! Apache is used pretty much anywhere that Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) is not. Open source, extensible, customizable, and supported heavily by the volunteers who wrote it, Apache is the bees knees of web serving.

This is a terrific solution for simple, static sites, and is scalable to enterprise-class web sites (though I wouldn’t run a huge site from home unless I had a bunch o’ bandwidth). It is tightly integrated with two additional web standard applications: PHP and MySQL, which will be discussed in future blogs.

Suffice it to say, any Mac truly capable of running OS X will make a great webserver. This means that bargain G4 and early G5 towers will do the trick, as will any Macintosh mini, or iMac (run Mac OS 9.2 on G3 iMacs, OS X on G4 and newer iMacs). Heck, there are people out there using PowerBooks as webservers.

One final caveat: most ISP’s don’t like the idea of you running a website from your home. They don’t like to see lots of uploads from your site to the net, and could impose bandwidth limitations or other restrictions if the site is too heavily trafficed (is that even a word?). A home webserver is best for sites with a very limited readership.

In future articles, I will talk about what kind of services you will need from your internet service provider (ISP), applying for and registering your domain name, setting up domain name services, configuring your router, keeping the rest of your home network secure, how to set up the software for both Classic Mac (OS 9.x) and OS X, the downside of running your own webserver, some web applications and services you can run on your new server, and maybe a few words about HTML editors and books on HTML writing (I have a few favorites). Sounds a little scary? It really isn’t, and is actually a lot easier to do than you might think.