Web serving load issues

[insomniaut]

The local utility company is going into media services, so I am lucky enough to be upgrading to a 1.5 Mbps (symmetric) connection at home. It comes with a static IP, so I am thinking of doing some personal web serving.

I have two choices:

Use my G4 iMac 1GHz 768 MB RAM to serve pages.

Buy or build a really cheap web server.


What sort of load would that put on my iMac? I doubt it would have many visitors at all, but I will likely have some media files for download (mainly for friends, family, and classmates). Most of the time my iMac sits at home asleep. I use it for the "heavy lifting" (Occasional video editing, though I will likely use GarageBand heavily).

If I decide to buy or build, I will likely use a 350 Mhz PII that is collecting dust. I would really prefer to stay "PC free" if I can though. Most of my friends have iBooks or Powerbooks, so, other than my iMac on occasion, I have no need for a "community" computer.

I know the iMac could easily handle the traffic, but I am concerned about what would suffer if I fully loaded it while recording. I'm guessing that recording runs at a very high priority level to prevent that as a problem.

As far as traffic, I anticipate 100-150 uniques a day, with 200 MB of transfer coming in bursts.

Any thoughts or suggestions? Thanks.

 

[valve1138]

I would go with a seperate box, since you have one, and because of what you use your iMac for.

 

[insomniaut]

Ok. Here is where I get really out there. Does anyone know of a way to install Linux on a PC without a keyboard, mouse, or monitor. I am fairly certain that I have it set up to boot without all of those.

I realize that I'm likely to have to find those things, but it would be very convenient if I do not.

Thanks.

 

[AntShaw]

In no way shape or form would I ever use my main machine as a web server. Let alone even have it on the inside of my home network.

My reccomendation would be to have a seperate box on the outside of my firewall on your network.

 

[Instigator]

that's why most firewalls have a DMZ on them so you can do just that

 

[insomniaut]

As I recall, the service I'm getting has 2 static IPs, so I should be able to specify the web server as one and then use the other one for NAT. I suppose my AE Base station can do that.