Right now I'm working on a couple websites (for myself and a few others), so I've been looking around a lot for web hosts. there's tons of hosts out there, but I keep finding that almost all of them are missing a feature I want/need, are too expensive, etc etc. Eventually, I came up with the idea that maybe I could just host my own server, so I started searching for info. it turns out that it's not going to be as hard as I thought it might to set one up for myself, all that's really needed for a server is:
1. A computer, any kind will do (Linux/Unix, Mac, Windows, as long as they've got the necessary hosting software, like Apache, IIS etc.) it doesn't need to be a very expensive computer, all that's needed are the basics (CPU/Motherboard, Ram, network card, CDrom, Hard drive)
2. a High speed connection like Cable or DSL, but you're going to need a static IP address, and a lot of bandwidth.
3. a Domain name pointing to your IP address.
once you have all these basics, then you need to get into all the configuration, like installing support for things like PHP, MySQL, anything like that which you're going to be needing for your sites. for operating system, I'm going to be using Linux (Mandrake 9.0) since I've found it extremely stable, plus the unix family is the native OS of Apache which is used by the majority of hosts out on the net right now. the one problem with using Linux or equivilent is it can be a pretty big pain to configure if you don't know a whole lot about it, since you will at some point have to use command line, there's not a whole lot of "wizards" like all the windows and mac folks are used to (although it is getting better)
This worked out well for timing for me, since I want get the experience of rebuilding a computer anyway, and I just found out that my dad's got an old 486 which he's let me gut and salvage the case, I also realized that I can get all the parts I'm going to need for around $250 cdn.
has anybody else around here ever done anything like this?
I'll keep you all updated on how this goes..
- David
1. A computer, any kind will do (Linux/Unix, Mac, Windows, as long as they've got the necessary hosting software, like Apache, IIS etc.) it doesn't need to be a very expensive computer, all that's needed are the basics (CPU/Motherboard, Ram, network card, CDrom, Hard drive)
2. a High speed connection like Cable or DSL, but you're going to need a static IP address, and a lot of bandwidth.
3. a Domain name pointing to your IP address.
once you have all these basics, then you need to get into all the configuration, like installing support for things like PHP, MySQL, anything like that which you're going to be needing for your sites. for operating system, I'm going to be using Linux (Mandrake 9.0) since I've found it extremely stable, plus the unix family is the native OS of Apache which is used by the majority of hosts out on the net right now. the one problem with using Linux or equivilent is it can be a pretty big pain to configure if you don't know a whole lot about it, since you will at some point have to use command line, there's not a whole lot of "wizards" like all the windows and mac folks are used to (although it is getting better)
This worked out well for timing for me, since I want get the experience of rebuilding a computer anyway, and I just found out that my dad's got an old 486 which he's let me gut and salvage the case, I also realized that I can get all the parts I'm going to need for around $250 cdn.
has anybody else around here ever done anything like this?
I'll keep you all updated on how this goes..
- David

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