Setting up a Web Server - The Most Important Step to Hosting
your Website from Home
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 sytems 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 web site. 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.
Actually, there is more, but these two steps will allow your web
server to start serving your website. Of course, there is also
more to hosting your website from home, like getting a domain
name, dealing with your router if you have one, 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.