Setting up a Web server - a simple, step still misunderstood hosts the web site from home

You might be trying to decide if you want to host your site on their own rather than pay a hosting company. Maybe you just want to learn how to do it, or if you want to save some money doing it yourself. In this article I will discuss the most important part of hosting your site from home, the web server.

The "server" word sounds scared and that is why many people think that only a professional hosting company can host a website. This is not true. A server is nothing more than software that runs in the background listening to requests from "customers". The client in this case is an internet browser like Internet Explorer.

How do you get a web server? Most Windows operating systems have a web server only needs to be installed. There are also Web servers that can be downloaded free of charge, such as Apache. I'm not going to go over how to do this. In this article we will discuss the concepts and what you need to get your web server up and running and serving your site to the public after it is installed. Each web server is different but the concepts are the same. To go beyond the general concepts that are true for each web server, you will know what to look for regardless of the software used.

As I mentioned before, a server is just software that runs in the background. A web server is a server that listens for requests of a specific page internet browser, find the page on your computer is running and then sends it to the browser that requested it. Keeping this in mind, can you believe that there are really only two things you must do to have your web server configured?

1) Tell us about your web server where to find your website. Your website is possibly composed of multiple pages. You need to tell the Web server, the path to the folder where you keep
your pages. For example, when someone types http://www.yourdomain.com/main.html, the server will look in the folder where all pages live and try main.html file.

2) Tell your web server on your default page. This is the page that appears when someone types http://www.yourdomain.com in your browser without specifying a page. The web server has some names as the default page "index.html", so if you have a page with this name
appears by default when no document is specified in the request. You can also add a little 'more than the default file names for your web server. If you do not want to name your file "index.html" you can tell your web server as the default page is "mainpage.htm".

This is basically all there is to configure your web server. In reality, no more, but these two steps will allow your web server to start publishing your site. Of course, there's more to host your web site from home, how to get a domain name, which deals with the router if you have one, but these topics are beyond the scope of this article.

I hope I've convinced you how easy it is to configure a web server, which seems to be the most important step to host your web site from home .......