I just forward *@mydomain.com to gmail. Having web software you can put up on your personal server is nice, but it poses a whole different set of challenges to just hosting it yourself.
You have to worry about how to manage copyrights, coming up with a distribution that will work on a wide variety of server configurations, and handling upgrades and customer support gets a lot more complicated. One more problem that I've seen with popular open source programs that run on your server, is that hacker's will look for exploits in the source code, and search the web for sites runnning that program, attacking every one. They can keep using these exploits for a long time, because most of the site owners are too lazy to download the latest upgrades as they come out.
Right now, at least on the low-cost end of the scale, it seems to me like open-source software is usually more up to those challenges.
This is the best distribution model I could think of, if you were going to try to sell software like this. You would try to work out something with cpanel or some hosting companies where users could choose a plan, pay for, and install you're software package and have everything managed right from their hosting admin panel.
If you were going to sell software for personal servers rather than host it yourself, then, I think you should do a lot of thinking about you're target market first, because you'll be causing yourself a lot of headaches. I don't think individuals with personal servers are the best target market for this business model right now either.
You have to worry about how to manage copyrights, coming up with a distribution that will work on a wide variety of server configurations, and handling upgrades and customer support gets a lot more complicated. One more problem that I've seen with popular open source programs that run on your server, is that hacker's will look for exploits in the source code, and search the web for sites runnning that program, attacking every one. They can keep using these exploits for a long time, because most of the site owners are too lazy to download the latest upgrades as they come out.
Right now, at least on the low-cost end of the scale, it seems to me like open-source software is usually more up to those challenges.
This is the best distribution model I could think of, if you were going to try to sell software like this. You would try to work out something with cpanel or some hosting companies where users could choose a plan, pay for, and install you're software package and have everything managed right from their hosting admin panel.
If you were going to sell software for personal servers rather than host it yourself, then, I think you should do a lot of thinking about you're target market first, because you'll be causing yourself a lot of headaches. I don't think individuals with personal servers are the best target market for this business model right now either.