How to setup a site that works in a home network

Question

Please help, I don't have any idea on how to host a webpage on a home network. Its just in a home network with 3-4 computers connected with a hub. And I've already installed wampserver on the computer that will host the pages. Im using windows 7 ultimate(the 2 computers)

Answer 1

I would suggest you start with a prepackaged solution like Bitnami Lampp. Try http://bitnami.org/stack/lampstack. In there you have anything to setup a lampp server very easily.

Regards.

Answer 2

1. You'll probably need to configure your home dsl/cable router to port forward http (tcp 80) or https (tcp 443) requests to the internal address of your webserver.
2. If you have a dynamic public IP address, you'll need to setup some type of dynamic dns (dyndns.com). It will map your dynamic public IP address to your domain name and update it each time you get a new dynamic IP address from your ISP.
3. If you have a static public IP address from your ISP, then you don't need dynamic dns. If you have a static public IP address then you need to make sure your domain name goes to your public IP address. Most likely which ever registry you used to purchase your domain can help you do this.

I am not sure what type of service you get from your local ISP. But if you have basic dsl/cable internet, then the above will get you up and running.

Answer 3

I don't know how to configure wampserver. I've had a little experience with IIS (from microsoft) and Apache.

Once you have wampserver configured, you should be able to access your site from the computer doing the serving by opening up your web browser and typing in "localhost" or "127.0.0.1" as the web address.

You will need to open up port 80 in your firewall on your machine. If you are using microsoft's firewall, then you can find the firewall settings in control panel. If you are using a 3rd party firewall or a firewall that might have come with your antivirus, then you will have to figure out how to open up port 80 in that software. You do not need to open up any ports in the router.

(If you want your site to be public to the world, you can set your router to forward requests to port 80 on your router to the web server)

Now that the firewall is opened up, you should be able to access your website by putting the IP address of your web server in the address bar of client machines in the same network. Type ipconfig in the command prompt of the system running wampserver to get it's IP address. You may also be able to use the hostname.

Corporate offices usually have DNS servers internal to their network that let them control what name all the workstations and servers on the network respond to. If you would like your website to respond to www.youraddress.com, then you'd need to set up a DNS server on one of your computers and configure all the workstations to use your local DNS server. If you dont want to set up a DNS server, you can just update the \windows\system32\Drivers\etc\hosts file on all the client machines to point www.youraddress.com to the IP address of the computer running wampserver or as stated before, you can just use the IP address or hostname to connect to the site from client machines.

I hope this helps. Good luck!

I hope this helps.