You might be
trying to decide whether you want to host your website
yourself rather than pay a hosting company. Maybe you
just want to learn how it is done, or you want to save
some money by doing it yourself. In this article I'll
discuss the most important part of hosting your website
from home, the web server.
The word "server" sounds scary and because of this many
people think only a professional hosting company can
host a website. This is not true. A server is
nothing more than software that runs in the background
listening to requests from "clients." The client in
our case is an internet browser, like Internet Explorer.
How do you get a web server? Most Windows operating
systems come with a web server that just needs to be
installed. There are also web servers than can be downloaded
for free, like Apache. I'm not going to go over how
to do this. In this article I'll discuss the concepts
and what's needed to get your web server up and running
and serving your site to the public after it's been
installed. Every web server is different but the concepts
are the same. By going over the general concepts that
are true for any web server, you'll know what to look
for regardless of the software you are using.
Like I mentioned before, a server is just software that
runs in the background. A web server is a server that
listens to requests from internet browsers for a specific
page, finds that page in the computer it is running
on and then sends it to the browser that requested it.
Keeping this in mind, can you believe there are actually
just two things you need to do to have your web server
configured?
1) Tell your web server where to find your website.
Your website probably consists of multiple pages. You
need to tell the web server the path of the folder where
you keep
your pages. For example, when someone types www.yourdomain.com/main.html,
the server will look in the folder where all your pages
live, and look for file main.html.
2) Tell your web server about your default page. This
is the page that is displayed when someone types www.yourdomain.com
in their browser without specifying a page. The web
server already has some default page names like "index.html"
so if you have a page with this name it will be displayed
by default when no document is specified in the request.
You may also add some more default file names to your
web server. If you don't want to name your file "index.html"
you can tell your web server that your default page's
name is "mainpage.htm."
This is basically all there is to configuring your web
server. Although web servers have a lot of other features
and settings, these are the two basic steps that will
allow your web server to start serving your website.
Of course, there is more to hosting your website from
home, like getting a domain name, dealing with your
router, but these topics are beyond the scope of this
article.
I hope I've convinced you of how easy it is to set up
a web server, which happens to be the most important
step to hosting your website from home.
For
more information on hosting your website from home visit
Setting up
a Web Server and Getting your Own Domain Name. |
