You need to know what your uplink is. Thats your real speed because when you serve you are uplinking to your clients. The 10 mbps speed is just what your provider lets you download to yourself from the internet. The actual speed they allow you to upload TO the internet is most likely 256KB/s to 756KB/s. And thats the speed that really counts, not the 10 mbps.
I think my upload speed is 768k or 1mb I'm not 100% on that. Thanks everyone for your replies. So what I got out of this is it's possible to do but I shouldn't put a large site on the server? How large of a site do you think will be okay with my upload speed?
It's not about the size of the site, you can comfortably host a full length film sharing site of a few GB as long as you don't get any visitors. You can do the math quite easily. 768KB up a second. Say an average forum page, like this one, is about 84KB. Say 77 KB to make it easy. That means per second, 10 pages fit through your your connection from your server to the visitors. Will you get more than 10 simultaneous users? If yes, you'll run into troubles. Your connection is probably also bound by a monthly limit. The above example if obviously over-simplified since it doesn't take caching into the equation etc. but you get the gist.
"768k upstream" means 768kbit/s, not kbyte/s. following your example, one would just be able to serve just more than one page per second.
Also remember that just because you have 10 visitors on your site at once doesn't mean they are all clicking links and downloading pages at the exact same second. Most of them will be actually reading pages or even better clicking ads
ugh - if you new - id advise agains it from experience. I hoseted a personal site for a few years from a win xp box with IIS5.1 - 500mbram, blah blah... it was good, but more trouble than worth. only good for development in my mind. you'll spend more time on server maintenence, and troubleshooting than you care to..trust me. with hosting SO cheap these day, why not pay for it.
don't even try it with dsl... but some of these cable companies have insane upload speeds... i clocked one that was feeding 6mbps into my server a couple of months ago. are you trying to do it as an underground thing? i'd imagine that too much bandwidth useage would be frowned on heavily, and it could get your account terminated. just pony up and rent a server... www.webhostingtalk.com is the place to look, they have several forums where hosting companies regularly post server deals.
And cheap hosting will usually get you just as much downtime. If you know what you're doing and you set it up right the first time on a decent server you won't have many problems. If you're a novice and don't know an httpd from an ftpd or an httpd.conf from a php.ini then of course you'll spend a lot of time troubleshooting and learning. So yeah I'd have to disagree with that statement. Good hosting with high or no bandwidth limits on a managed server is not cheap.
I'm not cheap when it comes to servers I have 6 servers right now but I thought that 1 month worth of server bills would get me a pretty good server. I was just wondering how it would handle. I guess there is too many cons to this.
These days dedicated hosting is so cheap it's almost not worth the hassle of doing it from home. You can get a box at a major hosting company in a solid datacenter for under $100/month. Then you have someone on staff to perform reboots, etc. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Chances are to that your DSL/cable connection is a residential service which isn't bound by the same AUP & TOS as a commercial dedicated line that is at a datacenter. When those lines go down things tend to be fixed relatively quickly. If your residential cable/DSL goes down and you tell them you're losing money because your websites are offline, they likely could care less. Just my two cents, but I'm also speaking from experience. I used to have a rack in my basement hooked up to a DSL circuit and quickly found that it just wasn't adequate enough when my income relies on it.