How do I setup a home webserver?

Q: How do I setup a home webserver?

The best thing to do would probably to get shared hosting if they aren’t big websites, VPS if they are larger.

However, running your own dedicated server is rather tricky, and probably will take up a lot more time than not the long run.

However, if you still want to run your own server, you need to use a service like dyndns.org to foward you home or work internet connection to the internet using a static ip address that can be reached. Most isps use dynamic ip addresses, which change every so often, and when people try to access the website, the website will still point to the old ip address and the site won’t load. Furthermore, you need to check if your current internet connection will allow webhosting on it’s servers.

It’s a good idea to run a server as a seperate computer and make sure it’s up and running well. Using a good preconfigured lamp (linux apache mysql php) stack, through a distribution such as Ubuntu Server and running that is a good idea. It helps to know some basic command line tools and utilities before trying to setup a server, it will save a lot of time.

If the server is behind a firewall (which it should be), you need to enable port fowarding on the firewall which fowards esternal requests to your home network to a certain computer… setting port 80 to go be unblocked and fowarded to the server will allow for that.

If you are using windows, and you want to do this, take a look at this good lifehacker article on the subject.