“One of the biggest issues involved with becoming a web publisher is the question of hosting. With an internet clogged with false hosting review sites, hosting companies trying to rip you off, and hosting companies run by 14 year olds, the majority of web publishers are at the mercy of random chance when it comes to finding a quality host. To solve this huge problem and to grant freedom to all, we have come up with 75 extremely specific steps that will get you up and running with a *nix box (running FreeBSD), along with the most recent versions of Apache, Perl, PHP, and MySQL.”
Although this isn’t an as powerful solution, here’s how to setup some basic hosting on a Mac
1. Click on preferences
2. Click on sharing
3. Tick “personal web sharing”
done. Put your docs in /library/webserver/documents
granted you need to sort out the router etc if that’s the case but it’s not 75 steps, geez.
I guess you haven’t actually read the article. The article starts from the downloading the right ISO image and burning the ISO image, and then goes onto installation, logging into the system through setting up servers(inc. installing daemons from ports) and putting up the documents. You were probably too lazy to figure out why it takes holly 75 steps to get to the level of serving webpages.
Setting up your own webserver at home is trivial. The tough part about self hosting is network reliability.
-You’ve got to set up some sort of notifier to tell your dns provider when your ip changes or change it manually every time.
-You’ve got to hope that your residential grade internet connection is reliable enough (or pay for something better).
-You’ve got to assume that nothing is going to go wrong in your home network. My router went down once for a few hours and my webserver stopped trying to get a dhcp lease. It took a long time to figure out because the tech support (me) wasn’t home.
The control you get when you host on your own is great, but if I had anything relatively important to keep online, I’d be paying for reliable hosting for sure.
It seems kinda odd that the author would tell users that they need FreeBSD to host, yet assume they need directions on burning an iso to a disc or using putty for ssh from windows. I mean, windows, properly secured, itself is adequate for home hosting.
That and the fact that it’s often illegal according to the End User Licsense Agreement you sign with your broadband provider. If you upgrade to a business account you are probably *legal* but even then some agreements don’t allow you to run a web server yourself.
Right… but some ISP just block the http port (80), thats the way they protect the End User License Agreement.
Violating the your provider’s Terms of Service (not EULA, that applies to software, not services) is not illegal. They may cancel your account and refuse to do business with you, but that is a far cry from the police hauling you off to jail.
If you don’t understand the difference between laws and contracts you probably shouldn’t be publishing anything, anyway.
Changing topics, I agree with the other posters that running a web server is easy. Running a server securely is more challenging. The article enabled SSH, but failed to disable root logins, failed to disable passwords, failed to describe setting up key pairs, and that’s just for remote access. Where’s the logging? The firewall setup? And so on…
Ok, I’ll concede that EULA was the wrong term, but come on! Just because you might not get caught doesn’t make it right. The practice of knowingly breaking rules to which you agreed to operate by should not be condoned and is very much the reason why providers start making life so miserable by locking things down. I think it’s one thing to have a web server for *personal* access only on a home ISP account that forbids web services for commercial purposes, but that’s not what’s being talked about here. The article specifically talks about being a web developer and having a secure space to host sites which implies (to me) public access sites. If I misread, I apologize.
I definately wouldn’t judge anyone for doing this, but I don’t think it should be publically condoned. And people wonder why ISPs start blocking ports! It’s because people abuse them.
I picked an ISP that allows servers. It is not immoral, illegal, or against *my* TOS to host servers.
I do not condone violating contracts. I also do not condone equating contract violations with breaking the law. That’s way over the top. Failing to rewind a videotape before returning it to the rental shop is a violation of the Terms of Service. Stealing the tape is a violation of the law. TOS != Law.
People should read and understand contracts before agreeing to them, and find another vendor if they don’t like the terms. That’s why I switched to an ISP that offers static IPs, allows servers, does not block ports, and has no traffic quota. I pay a little more, but only a little – it’s still a personal, not commercial, account. It is possible to host a web site on your home computer without breaking any rules of any type.
The assumption should be that an Internet Service Provider provides access to all Internet services, not a restricted subset. If not, call them something else, like a Web Browsing Provider, or WebTV, or AOL.
You may have given away your ability to run servers, but you shouldn’t assume everyone else has.
I mean, windows, properly secured, itself is adequate for home hosting.
I agree. I used Apache2triad ( http://apache2triad.sf.net ) on Windows 2000 Pro for web serving for awhile. Right now the computer is being revamped, and I’m going to use Ubuntu when I’m done (I printed out the ubuntu web server tutorial posted on OSnews not too long ago), but the windows box was pretty reliable, used Apache2, and provided all of the services I needed for building sites.
I think they left out the QOS part. page load times get shot to hell when little billy is uploading his favourite files.
IMO, making a public web server is not as trivial as simply installing L/F/WAMP, etc, but the administrator also needs to maintain the server, such as updating the system, concerns about security, etc, etc. Simply setup a server without further administration and maintenance is dangerous in that the server will contain security holes.
And I don’t really like these kind of step by step guides. Although readers can follow the steps, those don’t have knowledges in hosting (in FreeBSD in this case, for example) don’t have the knowledge to understand the steps, and they don’t really know what they are really doing. What they really need is the knowledge of the, at least, using the OS, the servers, and the methods to control the system, such that the users can setup servers by themselves.
Just my 2 cents.
Don’t see the connection between age of sysadmin with quality of hosting.
Personal hosting through a broadband provider for something slightly popular is a typical way to get yourself terminated from the provider. That’s not a risk many, except the naive, are willing to take. Besides, there are some incredibly cheap deals out there that provide some fairly decent services. Case in point, 1dollarhosting.com and webcomindia.net, and the India hosting is even better if your currency exchange rate is strongly in your benefit and you pay on a yearly or every other year basis. Still, it is nice that this author shared how to get yourself personally hosted so that you could debug stuff before pushing it up to a third-party provider.
What kind of experience have any of you had with companys like dynu.com, no-ip … I’ve used the free dynu.com and been pretty please with how it works. But interested in comparing companys that provide this type of service
I’ve never had trouble with DynDNS.org, and my Netgear router will update DNS for me through them as well.
Who wrote this tutorial? There are many steps missing… How about named, sendmail, portsnap, etc…? Following those steps won’t work, right from the beginning because he didn’t download and update ports…
How about security? You need to setup a firewall. Also if you just install PHP5 from the ports, it simply doesn’t work when you do a phpinfo(); – It requires editing some files.
I know because installing FreeBSD web servers is my job. I use a shell script that I made over the years, if you saw it, it’s a lot more than 75 steps!
Oh well…
That article is fine for hosting a site that you just want to exercise your web design skills on but expect your machine to get hacked over and over and over and over… until you go to a reliable host that has the network infrastructure to prevent that. I love it when articles like this pop up ommitting one of the most important aspects of hosting a web site – QoS/UPTIME/RELIABILITY. 99% of users will simply not get that with their home connection that their ISP can care less if it’s up or down and with their cheap BestBuy piece of crap all-in-one router with a joke of a built-in firewall.
Let’s be realistic here – most people that know how to setup a secure home network at their home in order to host a web site probably already have access to a number of web servers hosted in professional facilities …
Articles like this just make uneducated users think they can make it on their own to save some miserable $10/mo but all they’ll do is just open their network to intruders and get their machines filled with worms, viruses and all the other fun stuff that comes with them…
As I couldn’t agree more about the number of totally unreliable wanna-be web hosting companies out there, trying to host your site @ home is definitely not the solution.
Just my $0.02 … take it or leave it 🙂
Anyone have any experience or thoughts? For a small internal network, not connected to the Net? Or would you go the whole hog and use Apache?
that’s all
Good I live in Sweden, I’m quite confident it’s allowed by my ISP, and I got 100mbps for cheap ;/