Korean Job Discussion Forums

[The Hammer]

I need to set up a website. What are the key things to consider regarding a web hosting service?

[jaebea]

Here's a little breakdown which might be of help.

Space - Self explanatory. How many megs/gigs of files you can have on the host at any given time. 50 megs should be more than enough for a starting point for an average "blog" type site.

Traffic - How much data can be served from the host. Usually measured in gigabytes. 1 gigabyte is another good starting point for an average blog.

The techy stuff goes here.

PHP - Serverside scripting language which is the driving engine behind 99% of news and blog sites out there. Lets you easily update pages and content on your website.

A database (either MySQL or Postgres) - Ties in with PHP to provide your content.

CGI - Another type of scripting language, now obsolete with powerful PHP style scripts, but you may want to have CGI for some reason

You may also want a provider which supports ASP extensions if that's more your cup of tea.

Hope that helps.

jae.

[peemil]

Man... This forum is useful.

[Giant]

Guys,

Why not host it yourself? This is a little long so please be patient.


You will need only two things that will cost you!

1.
A permanent connection. I am sure most of us pay a flat rate for cable or DSL.

2.
Windows XP Pro

Thats all you need to pay for. Now let me explain the technical details. most people dont know this but XP Pro comes with IIS (Internet Information Services) By default this feature is not loaded as a component.

All you need to do is go to control panel, and then under "Add/Remove Programs" you will see "Add/Remove Windows components".

Then you will see something like this:



Just select all the sub-components and install it.

Now thats it, you now have a webserver. You will see a new folder off the root of your hard drive and that is called "Inetpub". In there should be two folders that you can use, one is "ftproot" and one is "wwwroot".

Now all you need to do is copy your files/photos into the "wwwroot" folder and they are public. Of course make some kind of sub-folder fileing system, so you dont loose track of whats what.

Okay, now that thats over, theres just one more thing to do. How will people find your website on the internet? especially since your IP address keeps changing.

The solution is really simple. There are two options, a free way, and a paying (of course with a domain name you want) way.

I am going to show you the free way. All you need to do is use a IP directing service like www.no-ip.com. What it does in essence is monitor your IP and update the main no-ip.com database with your current IP. All you do is install a small utility that you can download from their site to do this. There are others that offer the same service but for me no-ip.com has been the easiest.

Now with this you choose a part of the domain name you will register with no-ip.com. Mine for example is "http://gentlegiant.no-ip.com". I got to choose the "gentlegiant" part. The other part is fixed, although you can choose your domainhere.no-ip.xxx where xxx is .net, .info, .com, etc.

Well, I know this may sound crazy to you, but I love having my own web server. You can even setup a stand alone PC as your server, even an old PIII will work as a dedicated webserver, very inexpensive. you dont even need a monitor for it. Just remote access it via the workstation. (I had an old PII as my webserver for a while, worked fine)

Pros's
=======

Size is not an issue anymore. You are only limited by your hard drive space.
You can make your own webpages for all to see.
Flexibility
FTP service
Your own email address with no size limits on attachments etc.

Con's
=======

The ONLY drawback is that you of course need to keep your PC runnning 24/7.


So what do you think?

If you need some help with this, please let me know and I will be glad to help you set this up. I know its a lot to do for most people, but if you are up to a challange then having your own webserver is very rewarding. You can even later install SQL and PHP and get your own forum going, right on your own desktop.

Later guys,

[The King of Kwangju]

Good post.

[Demophobe]

[Giant]

Thanks guys, I have been running my own web server for a long time and it really is nice to do it yoruself. At the moment I use Windows 2003 Server, its also very easy to setup as a webserver.

I highly recommend getting a seperate PC for the webserver. It really does take the strain off when you want to do other things. At Yongsan you can buy a decent PIII system for about W150,000 (excl. monitor). Just maybe upgrade and buy a large hard drive since you may want to store all your mp3's and movies etc. Hard drives are so cheap these days so its worth it.

[Gollum]

I've been thinking of building an ultra-quiet mini-system with a VIA Cyrix chip for this. Nice post.

[SuperHero]

For those wanting paid hosting I would recommend Site5.com which I have been using for some time and am very happy with.

Giant I would be interested in knowing what the paid option is as I own several domains and if I switch to hosting myself I would need to know that. I'm actually almost at my 1gb of space limit now...

*edit* Changed hosts to site 5 and am happier with better service

[Giant]

The not so free option is to get a static IP address from your ISP. It costs more and some may not do it for you so you need to look around. Once you get that all you do is in your domain name config you re-direct yoru traffic to that IP. Easypeeseejapaneesee.

So what I am saying is that all you need to do is buy your domain name, (About $7 a year) and pay for your static IP connection. (I have not checked prices since I dont mind doing it the "cheap" way)

At the end of the day it costs more, but then you still have your own web server and tons of hard drive space. And its cheaper than if you get a ISP to host 200GB+ of data if you know what I mean.

[the saint]

Giant - superbly easy to follow post and very informative. I'd been wondering about this myself.

Here's a question though. We have our website and domain name. How do you do all the DNS server stuff if you run XP Pro and IIS as you mentioned? We wouldn't want to change our dedicated domain name but the thought of having my own server would be a dream and so so cheap and stable in comparison to some of the hassle I've had to put up with.

Another thing - whatabout streaming files such as rams? Can you do this in the setup you mentioned?

Cheers

[Giant]

In your case, you would probably need to get a static IP address from your ISP and then just re-direct traffic from your domain name to the IP they give you.

As for streaming media, of course it can be done, but you would most likely need to run a server OS, not Windows XP. There might be a app or plugin for ISS that would do it but I dont know of any off hand.

[SuperHero]

Just thought I would add an update to this thread. The domain register I use, RegisterFly offers dynamic DNS which is basically the same as the no-ip option. At least it appears that way. I haven't yet tried it out, but will probably be doing that once June rolls around and I have more free time and buy a router.

[mishlert]

I've been thinking about hosting my sight, but at the moment I'm paying and am happy with my host, Exist Hosting.

[Gord]