I want to set up a web server to learn and to host my own sites and my friends' sites from my home. I was wondering if anybody could point me in the right direction and help me get started. The main services I want to offer are http, ftp, dns, and mail. I have a few basic questions:

How do I choose an operating system? I am leaning towards Red Hat.

What type of system will I need to build? I am going to buy new parts and I have the money so I would like to put together a competitive machine.

What networking decisions will I have to make. Right now I have a dynamic IP from my DSL provider. I have a DSL modem and a router (not using the router right now). I have other PC's that I would like to be able to use on this gateway as well. Will I have to have an IP for each machine?

Thank you in advance for any help.

-jnoody

Start here: http://www.dslwebserver.com/

Not sure about hosting a website in Linux. I'm hosting my site in IIS 6 and I have learned alot from the experts here. :D

Pardon my ignorance, but what is IIS 6?

luki,

that site was EXACTLY what i needed. thank you, thank you...thank you.

-j*~

Please ignore my comment about IIS 6. I am going with linux for sure.

-j*~

Everything you are looking for... (at least on the software side)

http://www.devside.net

If you are just starting out, stick to a WAMPP (Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP-Perl) solution.

On the hardware side, if you have a PIII with 256MB ram, you should be just fine.

probably easier to just get $4.95 a month hosting account that allows add-ons

Hi, I don't know how much you know about web server(IIS , Apache..) and HTML, JAVA. These can be found at internet.


Here I can tell you is something about dynamic IP. You know your IP is changed everytime you logon internet, so almost none will reach your server. You need a Dynamic IP DNS tool. Lefy Eye Dynamic IP DNS is the one. Everyone can reach you by a static domain name even if you have no fix IP.


You can visit website dnsp2p.com and get more detailed infomation.

My "dynamic" IP has not changed for about 6 months.