The main issue for anybody who wants to move their website to a personal server would be their personal website host’s reliability. When working with professional website hosts, they usually have various technologies set up to prevent websites from actually going down at any time. When working with personal servers, however, you won’t instantly have this type of protection.

It would be highly essential to have your website available for all-out visitor and customer access 24/7; this would be the internet’s nature. If visitors come to your website and get an error, chances are they will get frustrated and just not come back, losing you a valuable customer.

To lessen the amount of customers lost, web hosts need to reach 99.9% guarantees of up-time, if not more. Naturally, this can only be done with lots of effort. Here are several things you might have to worry about: software failures, hardware failures, power outages, necessary maintenance, plus other unforeseen circumstances. In general, web hosts need to do every single thing in their power to ensure that their websites are constantly available.

When transferring websites onto your personal server, it would be essential to strive for standards set by professional web hosts. Even though you do not worry about losing angry clients due to down-time, you will have to worry about losing them when they aren’t able to get into your website. Sadly, it would take lots of money and effort to get the greatest results possible.

However, many reliability problems can always be improved through buying or renting space within server banks, which have proper conditions like backup generators to keep hardware working well. Of course, there would still be a lot of problems that you need to deal with yourself for maximum availability.

An obvious form of the reliability you worry about would be your server’s physical reliability, as well as its overall environment. If you opt for server banks, this would be pretty much out of your control. Because of this, you should ensure to opt for low-risk geographic locations. For example, you may want to stay away from cities notorious for large earthquakes or flooding.

If you want to house a personal server, there are various preventative measures you could take in order to improve the reliability of your server. For example, you would get backup generators to kick in whenever the power dies. Power outages could happen anywhere and you need to take them into account.

You also need to keep the environment of your server dry and cool at all times. Electronics will not work well if they overheat or get exposed to liquids. You will also need a system of filtration to reduce air dust and regularly clean the server to prevent the accumulation of dust on the components.

As for the actual server, you should consider investing in “ghost” machines that redundantly store all of your first server’s information. By doing so, if the initial machine ends up failing, the second one will instantly kick in to keep websites going. Sadly, computers still crash every now and then, so you will have to get ready for things like that.

by Loren Allen