Building your own Web Server
Monday, December 14th, 2009 | Author:

Creating web sites is fun and very easy to do just check out my previous articles on creating a web site. But to publish your web site you have to have either free web hosting, purchased web hosting or your own web hosting. Here we will discuss setting up your own web hosting server from home and the ups and down of doing so. There are also a few things that you should be aware of when you setup your own web server. If you want people to get to your web site via a .com name, like mikenetpc.com you will have to purchase that name but if you are cool with being able to access your website via your IP address then more power to you. A lot of home internet service providers do not like home users publishing a website across their connection because it can use a lot of band width. The other thing to remember about home based ISP is that they don’t normally give their home users a static IP address. So everytime your modem reboots you are likly to get a different IP address and their for a different place for your visitors to go. 

With all that being said their are three things that I recomend you have to create your own web server depending on the OS.

Windows XP, 2003

  • Computer
  • IIS (Usually comes with any version of windows)
  • Internet Connection

Linux:

  • Computer
  • Apache Server Installed (get it here)
  • Internet Connection

Apache is a great free and very powerful web hosting program allowing you to host HTML and PHP web sites on a Linux or Windows PC. IIS will only run on a Windows PC and is just as powerful as Apache but it will allow you to host HTML and ASP (Microsofts server side language). You can however get PHP to run on an IIS server with a little tweaking, I have done it. So depending on the type of web programming you are going to want to do is going to decide which program you are most likly to use. If you have a comptuer lying around with Windows XP on it you should be able to get a web server up and running with IIS in no time. If you have a computer lying around with no OS on it then Linux and Apache would be the best choice because they are both free.

Either way you go will provide you with a great flexible web server that you can use to host your own web sites. For more information on creating your own web server check out our videos under the products section or at http://videos.mikenetpc.com 

Category: Misc, Software, Web Design  | Tags: , , , ,