Can someone please explain how to host a website? Just a personal site
that I can host on a spare PC at home. I have a registered domain name
already and a high-speed connection. I'm not interested in those
no-frills, free homepages through Yahoo or whatever, nor do I want to
pay for a hosting service. I'd like to build my own from scratch and
maintain it. I have some basic HTML tools and I'm pretty computer
savvy (for the most part).



Thanks!

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Request for Question Clarification by efn-ga on 30 Mar 2006 00:25 PST

I think the amount of information involved in answering this question
completely is too much for this page, but there are websites that
address this question.  Would links to such sites be a satisfactory
answer?

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Clarification of Question by rn1677-ga on 30 Mar 2006 06:58 PST

Yeah, links would be okay. I don't need a full-blown step by step,
just some guidance.

Thanks...

Hi rn1677,

As I said, everything you might need to know to host a website might
make a very long answer, but there are sites on this topic that should
be helpful.

The DSL/Cable Webserver site looks quite detailed and informative.
http://www.dslwebserver.com/

The DIYwebserver site doesn't look quite as good as the DSL/Cable
Webserver site, but it has a lot of information and may fill in some
gaps.
http://www.diywebserver.com/

These two sites seem to be the main ones people refer to in response
to questions like yours.  Both have fairly active forums, which is a
good sign.

geekhaven.net has a relatively short Home Server Tutorial.
http://tutorials.geekhaven.net/homeserver/


I hope these links are helpful.  If you get stuck, feel free to ask
for a clarification here, and I will help you if I can.  I am not an
expert on this topic, but I have set up web servers successfully. 
Good luck with your hosting project.

--efn

This is fairly simple:

All you basically need is:

- a spare computer with windows or linux
- i would suggest Apache as a http server (www.apache.com)

Then if you need mysql and php just get them from www.mysql.com and
www.php.com and install them.... Apache should find these with no
problem.!

Then simply upload your website to your server in the specified apache root folder!

Hope this helps :)

forgot to mention... i assume you wil have a router.. if this is the
case port forward 80 or 8080 to your spare computer. This should make
it availiable to the web, type localhost on the spare computer browser
to test the website is up and running.

You may also need to setup a nameserver on the spare box, alternativly
point the domain to your ip (if you need a static ip from your dynamic
ip i would suggest no-ip.org)

thanks