Personal web server
This article is about appliances. For Microsoft's offering, see Microsoft Personal Web Server.
A personal web server, or personal server in short, allows users to store, selectively share, or publish information on the web or on a home network. Unlike other types of web servers, a personal web server is owned or controlled by an individual, and operated for the individual's needs, instead of by a company. It can be implemented in different ways:
- as an appliance
- as a general-purpose server, such as a Linux server, which may be located at the owner's home or in a data center
- in a shared hosting model, where several users share one physical server by means of virtualization, or virtual hosting.
- as one feature of a computer that is otherwise also used for other purposes.
A personal web server is conceptually the opposite of a web server, or website, operated by third parties, in a SaaS/cloud model.
Advantages
- Privacy: as the personal server is owned by the individual that derives the main benefit from it, they are in control of who else may access information on the server
- Autonomy: the owner of the personal server decides which applications to run on the server, who to allow access to, when to upgrade, etc.
- Hackability: the owner of the personal server can configure and change any aspect of the personal server
Disadvantages
- Administration overhead: the owner of the server is responsible for system administration
- Higher power consumption: the power consumed per user is higher, on average, than in a model where many users use the same server, such as in the SaaS/cloud model.
- Poor scalability: the server may function poorly or crash if its resources are heavily accessed
See also
References
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 7/15/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.