Sunday 7 August 2011

How to Create a Free Web Hosting in Your Home? (2)

(For the latest PDF files Merger Software please have a look at the top of the left margin, inside the red box.) Next you need to test your IP address on the Internet. (Please also read the previous post.)This is different with your private hub IP addresses. It is the unique address given by your broadband service provider to the location of your router on the entire Internet.You can get it on different places.
For example, log into your router and click on "Basic Setup" you find it as

It is something like "98.227.112.49" This number is as good and working as any important site such as www.un.org or other sites. Ask a friend to type that IP address in their browser and voila! He will be directed to your hand-made web site. Remember from the previous post that if your default home page is not "index.htm" you have to configure "httpd.conf" file accordingly, or type "http://98.227.112.49/home.html". You have a web hosting of your own free. This IP address is subject to arbitrary change by the provider. It is dynamic for ease of maintenance. People join to and opt out from a provider and their address will be given to others. You also may change the provider or your residential. It also cannot be remembered easily. It needs a mnemonic to help to memorise. There are companies on the Internet that provide you with a free client software for maintaining a constant connection of the Internet with your potentially changable IP through a mnemonic of your choice. These companies are called "Dynamic DNS Provider" or such. You can use your favourit search engine to find one. By client I mean the old PC that is being used for your in-the-home web hosting. It is necessary that you subscribe to such a free service. Then download and install the client software on the "client" following their simple instructions. This mnemonic is not a top level domain such as www.anexample.org. It is a subdomain such as "subexample.anexample.org" Mine is messiah.dyndns.inf. I got dyndns.inf from free DynDns' many available options. I mention their name as a gratitude to the free service. If you like to have a top domain name, then you have to buy one by paying £5 ($8) (at the time of writing this article) a year. Many of more attracting names are being used by others or are bought to be kept to sell for higher prices. After purchasing that domain name or if you already have one, then you can redirect your top domain name through that dynamic IP provider to your home made web site.  dynamic IP provider tells you how you should do that. (freedns.afraid.org starts by default from a top domain name of yours. Their dynamic DNS service is also free. With £5 ($8) a year (at the time of writing this article) you buy a domain name from any seller and then redirect it through dynamic dns and nameservers of freedns.afraid.org to your home web server.) You should follow guidelines to maintain your down-time to minimum per year. It is easy to surpass in quality over an expensive web hosting if you minimise load of that web server machine. Do not use it for other purposes and do not put more than the minimum of operating system software on it. Uninstall additional software (sometimes called bloat-ware) that comes with an operating system and has not any use for your web server. It is possible to gain an old PC with an OEM Windows XP installed under £20 ($30) or sometimes drastically less than that on the eBay now a days. You can upgrade it to a 3GHz CPU, 3GB RAM. The bad thing about a desktop PC is its electricity consumption and noise that it creates. Bad thing about old laptops is that you cannot upgrade its cpu easily and old laptops normally cannot accept  more than 1GB of RAM. By the end of 2012 Britain will be the first country that all its communication network will be on the Internet. There will remain no conventional telephon switching after that. Thanks to optical fiber on your door, speed of connections are not subject to trafic load and distance and is constant all around the clock. Hosting at home is the next asset that you can have besides being just consumers of  the other web sites. At the end this is very pleasing job to accomplish. It is fulfilling like ham radio and DXing, when you were producer of your own equipments instead of buying them. After preliminary set up of the site, there'll be many Elmer's notebooks on the Internet that paves the way towards full professionalism. For example, click on this link, http://messiah.dyndns.info/CodesForUs.html. You can find that I have moved part of this blog on into that web site at my home. (Thanks to Grant Hardy who edited this post from the US)
(Update : See also this post Web Hosting at Your Home (Revisited) )
Update, 25 March 2014 : You might find these two wikis useful, too.
They include images and are step-by-step.

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