So you want to run a web server from home … or (wherever)? … You are interested in serving html pages or an ftp site (or whatever) … maybe you just want to share files with friends and family …. So where do you start?
Well maybe I can help. Most of what I have to say will be influenced by the idea, “doing it for free or for little cost or without losing an arm and a leg”.
YOU’LL NEED SEVERAL THINGS.
First and foremost you’ll need some server software, there are a range to choose from which can be downloaded from the internet, some cost and some don’t .. (Visit http://bytesandbites.is.dreaming.org for a downloadable list). Of course if you have a registered Domain Name this maybe all that you need, however as we are doing this on the cheap you may need some other systems. I’m going to write this as though you have a basic internet dial-up connection at home on your personal computer and you want to run your server from there. This way we can cover and learn about most things and you can choose the level at which you want or need to operate, and set up your system accordingly.
So you’ve found a web server that you like and you have installed it on your computer, I won’t go into how you do this as the method is as diverse as the number of servers that are available and you will have to read and follow the installation instructions very carefully as there are a number of pitfalls. Your installed web server seems to be working OK so why isn’t his enough, what other bits do I need to sort out?
HERE’S WHERE WE HAVE TO LEARN A LITTLE BIT ABOUT HOW THE
INTERNET WORKS.
Every computer has an IP address (Internet Protocol Address), which allows other computers find your computer (when you click on a link on a web page, and the linked site is found, it uses the IP Address to find where to send the information back to so that it can be displayed in your Browser, just like your mailbox number allows the mailman find your house. When you aren’t connected to the internet this address is usually 0.0.0.0 (you can check this by finding the file (on PC’s): … C:WINDOWSwinipcfg.exe and running it (or double clicking on it), and it will display the IP Address of your computer. Now connect to the internet and run this file again, …What! … It now reads something like 203.173.237.19 … so some little geek has been in your computer … and has changed some settings no less! Thats right .. your ISP (Internet Service Provider), has allocated your computer an IP Address. Now more than probably on your dialup ISP account, that IP Address is dynamic, in other words next time you connect to the net it will be quite different, or it may even be changed by the ISP in ten minutes or an hour or so while you are online. (IP Addresses are made up of four numbers separated by periods each between 0 and 255)
The reason that the number changes is that there are so many people requiring internet connections and so few numbers, so to speak, that ISP’s only get allocated enough numbers to cover the number of clients that they have connected at any one time, (well that’s the theory but we all know that sometimes they run out of numbers … that’s why we can’t connect when we really really need to, sometimes 🙂 everyone cannot have a permanent number. Because most people aren’t connect to the internet all the time, so the numbers that the ISP has been allocated get shared around. Hence DYNAMIC IP ADDRESSES, which is an important discovery for us in our quest to have a server on our Dialup account, and I will come back to this. Some ISP’s may allow you a ‘static’ IP address (one that doesn’t change), but you will probably have to pay well for it. There is another part of the game that we need to acknowledge first, that is DNS (Domain Name Server).
Computers work well with numbers, humans work better with names, so we give a kind of alias to our IP Addresses, these are normally bought like “amazon.com” or “cocacola.com” these are Domain Names. Very basically when we type http://www.someplace.org into the url box on our browser a message is sent to our ISP’s DNS which translates the Domain Name into the IP Address (similar to the one above) that has been registered to that Domain Name. This leads to ‘someplace.org’s’ ISP’s DNS which passes the request to ‘someplace.org’s’ web server. But hey, hang on a minute, if ‘someplace.org’ is serving the web from a computer with a Dynamic IP Address, and the IP Address gets changed, it will be different to that which has been registered to ‘some place.org’ (it’s OK if ‘someplace.org’ can afford a static IP Address but our model has a Dynamic IP Address), then our messages and requests are going to get horribly lost! …
TIME TO LOOK AT SOME MORE SOFTWARE, …. AUTOMATIC DYNAMIC DNS UPDATERS.
This particular type of software will update a DNS record of any changes that are made to your IP Address, so now other computers can still find yours even though your IP Address keeps changing. (Visit http://bytesandbites.is.dreaming.org/4free/server5.htm for a download list).
DYNAMIC IP HOSTING SERVICES
We could leave our system like this and it would work quite well .. but because we like names instead of numbers … and can remember them better and because we haven’t gone and bought a registered Domain Name for our budget web service, we are going to have to perhaps form a friendly alliance with some other nice people already on the web (most of them free, some require that you display banner ads. for them), these people offer Dynamic IP hosting services, in other words you can tap into their already registered Domain name, i.e. I have a small server that I run from my home computer, I use it to test out web pages that I have designed. I haven’t registered a Domain name for it (I don’t run it full time, only when needed), so I have tapped into ‘dyndns.org’ at http://www.dyndns.org to host my Dynamic IP they have several domains that I can use .. (*.dyndns.org, *.mine.nu, *.ath.cx, *.itacs.to) where the name of my choice takes the place of the ‘*’. I have chosen bytesandbites as my Domain name so if my server was running and you were to type http://bytesandbites.mine.nu/ into the url (universal resource locator) box in your browser, you should see whatever pages were present in the root directory of my web server in the computer that I am working on right now. (Visit http://bytesandbites.is.dreaming.org/4free/server4.htm for a list of sites that offer Dynamic IP Hosting).
WEB HOP SERVICES
It may also be of interest to know that most sites that offer Dynamic IP Hosting also offer Web Hop services, that is if you have a website on a providers server which has an ungainly name and you haven’t registered a domain name for it you can do a similar thing to Dynamic IP Hosting, and simplify your web sites address in the process, ie the default address of this site is: http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~olamb/ but you can also get to it using any of the following web hop addresses:
http://bytesandbites.is.dreaming.org
http://4free.is.dreaming.org
http://bytesandbites.da.ru
http://www.bytesandbites.net
CAREFUL WITH FRAMES
One thing that it pays to be aware of when using any of these facilities is that most Dynamic IP Hosting sites encapsulate your pages in frames, … nothing wrong with that except that it may compromise the submission of your site to search engines unless you are very careful how you set up your site and meta tags.
Owen Lamb – Lecturer, Computer Aided Design and Architectural
Technologies. Special interests; Internet and Web Site Design.
His
site is jam packed with TOTALLY FREE Advice, Tutorials, Tools
and Articles on Web Site Design and Deployment:
http://bytesandbites.is.dreaming.org email: bytes@ihug.co.nz