Admit it, who wouldn’t want his own website. A personal website is not just for technical geeks, anybody can build his own easily.
Historically, people had slow modems to connect to the internet, making it difficult for them to host their own websites at home. Things have changed dramatically over the past couple of years, nowadays, almost everybody has a high speed internet connection (via DSL, cable or satellite).
Given a high speed internet connection, having your own website is almost free. In fact, most ISPs offer you free homepage space at their servers. If you don’t mind typing the long urls and the limitations (e.g. for most ISP hosted websites, you can only use plain HTMLs and can’t customize your website that much), this is the easiest way to go and as long as you had the experience of using Word (or similar word processing programs), you are good to go. In this article though, I am going to explain to you how you can host your own website with your own domain at home.
First, you need to have a domain. While it is true that you can use whatever IP addresses you get to access your own websites, it is not convenient. Especially at the service level you get from most ISPs, you only have a dynamic IP (which means it changes from time to time). But, you don’t necessarily have to register your own domain (approximately $20 a year). You can get a free sub-domain from domain service providers such as DynDns. What is cool about DynDns is that you can use many free utilities to dynamically update your IP with the Domain Name server, so to the outside world, your website is just like any other site even though your IP changes from time to time. This website for example, uses DynDns service. If you want a dedicated domain name, you can register one at www.domain.com, but as long as your IP is dynamic, you would always want to use DynDns to synchronize your IP changes with the Domain Name Server.
To find out what your IP is, please check the bottom of this page.
Then you will have to have an operating system that support web servers. All linux operating systems support web servers. If you are running Windows(R), you will have to have at least a Windows Xp Prof (or Windows 2000, Windows NT) to be able to run your own website using IIS (you can always use the open source Apache web server instead of IIS). By default, all http servers use port 80, you need to make sure that your firewall allows port 80 traffic to pass through. Some ISPs do not allow port 80 traffic, and the only way to get around it is to map a different public port (e.g. 8080) to the local computer’s port 80.
How to actually create a website is beyond the scope of this post. There are many resources you can refer to. The W3CSchool should be a good place to get you started.
