Beginners Guides: Website Hosting From A Home PC

Obstacles like IIS and dynamic IP addresses can make the process of running a website off a home broadband internet connection complicated... There are several tricks you'll need to know to get it working, so follow along and get clicking! - Version 1.0.0

Websites are still cool. It doesn't matter how many badly designed personal sites there are out there with questionable flash animations and animated GIFs abounding; the fact is that a website still offers you almost unlimited room for personal expression, with the added side-bonus of potentially being useful.

If you want a website badly enough, there are many service providers that will be only too willing to design the site for you, then host it on one of their servers

for a monthly fee. If you have the cash, you can have a website of your own quickly and easily.

But what if you have the ideas but not the cash? Why pay someone else to host your website for you when you can easily do it yourself on the home computer over a broadband Internet connection?

In this guide, PCSTATS will explore the process of hosting a website from your home computer using a broadband Internet connection. For the sake of simplicity, we'll stick to using Microsoft's IIS (Internet Information Server) to render the site, and help you deal with the issues of dynamic IP addresses, among other potential home-based web hosting problems.

We'll leave the details of creating your own HTML website up to you. There are plenty of freely available programs that can help you do this, and of course you can always just use Notepad to code up the HTML by hand, so no excuses. We're only interested in the hard parts of hosting a website from a home PC!

Note: Since this PCSTATS beginner's guide only covers using Microsoft's IIS application to host websites, users of Windows XP Home edition or Windows 98SE/ME are out of luck. Unfortunately, IIS is not included with these operating systems. We may produce a guide on using a third-party web hosting program like Apache later on, depending on reader interest. For the purposes of this guide,Windows NT/2000/XP Professional will all work.

Before we get going, we need to get familiar with a few basic concepts, namely DNS (Domain Name System) and IP (Internet Protocol) addresses and how they are used when hosting a website. The following descriptions are slightly (or not so slightly) simplified, but they will suffice for our objective.