Very urgent! How do I set up a server to serve a web site? Pls help!

[HoSs]

Ok, my dad has a company called Allied Recycling and he wants me to make him a website (www.alliedrecycling.com) and I have no idea what to do! I looked at Microsoft's server (http://www.microsoft.com/siteserver/site/default.htm) and it says you need windows nt but my dad has win95. my dad's computor is kinda crappy, but I'm not gonna buy a full-blown server computor and dsl and crap just for maybe 3 short html pages. I'm not about to pay 50$ a month for one of those rip-off registrar services either. I found a site called http://www.first-year-free.com where you can register domain names for 35$
I need somebody to tell me step-by-step how to set up a server to serve http://www.alliedrecycling.com. Ok? please help me! I beg of you oh merciful people; help me!

[Mark Sreeves]

How much traffic will your site need to handle?

How complicated will it be?

Assuming it's not gong to be a fully fledged e-commerce site...

I expect your best bet (to start off with) would be to

set up a site with a free ISP

register the name and map it to your free area

[Jeroen Vreuls]

Setting up a server with Windows 95?

For an intranet that would be fine, but I wouldn't recommend connecting it to the Internet because of the security problems. And a Win 95 machine hangs most of the time (mine just did).

I'm running a RedHat Linux webserver myself, just for the intranet and just for experimenting. Linux isn't that complicated as lang as you read some docs.

For Allied Recycling, I would recommend going to a web hosting company and rent some web space there. That's easier that setting up your own server.

[vwiley1]

Hi again,

Don't let them scare you. Running a server with omnihttpd is very easy to do. My younger brother who is 13 years old just set one up on his computer the other day. He is very computer literate, but this wouldn't of been a hard task even if he had just gotten his computer. All it requires is that you know your IP address, you can fill out a few forms on a website, and you can install software, and set a few variables.

Now time to let them scare you. Win 95 is a bad operating system to run a server on, since your IP address will be readily available to the public, and the fact that you can be nuked by malicious users when they send a command to your IP address, basically given you the blue screen until you reboot. This problem is fixed with win98, so I recommend getting that first. Also win98 is more stable all the way around.

Another scare... If you are on a modem that is 56k or slower, this site is going to be extremly slow to the person connecting to it. I reccommend getting a cable modem or dsl, with dsl i reccommend getting some firewall software. With cable, at least mine, a firewall would not be necessary.

Any questions? Feel free to ask.

[NatmanZ]

This may be obvious, but no one has mentioned that to be able to host your own website, you need to be on the internet 24/7. I don't recommend 56K or slower because it isn't dedicated, get cable or dsl if you havn't already. By the time you do all of this, it's probably gonna be cheaper to just let an ISP host the page for you. It isn't really that expensive, I've seen ISPs that do everything for you at just $30 per month.

[Mark Sreeves]

I think I said somthing along those lines NatmanZ!

Here in UK I acan register a .co.uk domain name for £17 for 2 years and a .com or .net one for about £19 for 1 year.

There are dozens of free ISP oferring webspace some of which are unlimited capacity.

If you want to host Active Server Pages there are sites that will do that for free as well!

So, I could have a .co.uk domain running 24*7 for complete with email forwarding and NO unwanted advertising for about 3 pence per day in total!

I don't know what that is in Micky Mouse money, probably about $0.06

[parksie]

if you need to run a webserver on win9x, then there's pretty much two choices: omnihttpd (slower / easy to set up), or Apache (faster / hard to set up). I run Apache on my computer (it was 98 but now 2000) to test websites i make, before uploading them to a server.

ps: I don't recommend running a server on 9x, use NT / 2000. better still use a Unix-based setup like BSDI, which are geared completely for being a server.

[dangerousdave]

Ahem.

So far I managed to get a free domain name (www.brekfast.co.uk) and free cgi access so I can make a killer page. One more thing I cant seem to get for free though SSL hosting... PLEASE could someone tell me what the cheapest way of getting SSL hosting would be - and if it would be possible (somehow, although I cant see how) to get SSL without having to pay whoever hosts SSL for domain hosting and webspace, cgi etc, since, as I said, I already got those free.

[parksie]

I don't know about cheap, but you're unlikely to find it for free, because a lot of free providers use IP-less hosts, that is, many hostnames are bound to one server, and it sorts them out then.

With SSL, the Host: header field is required to identify the target hostname, the target hostname is required to send the appropriate certificate to open the SSL connection, yet the Host: header cannot be read until the SSL connection is open. This problem is unsolvable until either SSL itself is changed, or you have a single address.