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Hosting your Website - Do it yourself in 7 Easy Steps
How hard is it to host your website yourself? Hosting companies are making a ton of money,
and with good reason. Without hosting, there is no website. There are many benefits of having your
website professionally hosted. However, for some of us, it might make more sense to do it ourselves,
for now. For example, if you are starting a new business or playing with an idea that you are not sure
will work, you might not want to pay a hosting company to host your site, at first. Hosting the site
yourself will allow you to save money that you can use to grow your business. Once your business
starts growing and your site starts getting a lot of visitors, then you will find it necessary to pay a
web hosting company to host it for you, but until then, you need to test the waters.
If you have a computer and a high speed internet connection you can host your own website.
You will need to keep your computer on and online 24/7, which should be no big deal.
Below, I list the 7 steps required to host your own website from home:
1) Install a web server: Most Windows operating systems either come with a web server,
or one can be downloaded for free depending on the version of Windows. The web server
is the program that runs in the background on your computer listening to requests from
people on the internet. It's the software that finds the pages in your computer and sends
them to the users requesting it.
2) Configure the web server: In this step you simply tell your web server where to find your
website that is sitting somewhere in your computer.
3) Get a domain name: In this step you decide on the name that you want for your site and buy
it from a provider. Domain names are cheap and you pay the fee only once a year.
4) Configure DNS: Domain names exist only to make it easier for us humans to remember a
website address. You can think of DNS as a database containing name-IP pairs.
For example, the pair "(Google.com, 216.239.57.99)" associates the name "Google.com"
with the IP address of the computer that has the website. The computer's IP address is
what the browser needs to connect to a computer containing a website. In this step you
basically add an entry to the DNS database by modifying the settings of your domain name account.
5) Configure your router: Your router needs to know about the computer that has the web
page so it knows where to send the visitors. This is because when you have a router,
people connecting to your domain name actually connect to your router and not your computer.
6) Solve the dynamic IP problem: Most people have a dynamic IP address given to them by their ISP.
This means the IP address of your computer might change. This is a problem because DNS needs to
know the IP address of the computer that people need to be forwarded to when typing a domain name.
There is a way to solve this problem without having to pay your ISP more money for a static IP.
There are applications that will automatically update DNS when your IP changes.
7) Secure your server: The last step is to make sure your computer is protected from malicious
programs on the internet by having the necessary software installed and configured.
About the author:
Copyright Pedro Garcia
At http://www.webhostingsteps.com you will find an ebook that shows you how to perform
each of the steps described in this article
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