Your personal computer can be a webserver!

August 17, 2010 by shabinesh

Running a serious web-sever from your PC could make you the glorious sucker unless you have a good network speed/bandwidth or a highly unpopular site. But its a great feeling having a web-server run from your computer, its more of thrill and fun. If you are worried about your network speed here are few tips:

• try making a static page with needed information.
• if you are having images and other media then try to load it from external links which will greatly reduce the load on your computer/network.

  example: you can put you album from picassa, and images from other site….

Server setup:

1. configure your router, see if there is anything called “virtual server” , add a entry in it with the external port 80 and your internal port which is usually 80[by default or change it to your own port at /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf or /etc/apache2/apache2.conf]
2. Put you webpages in /var/www/html or /var/www/ in debian.
3. Start you webserver “service httpd start” or “/etc/init.d/apache2 start” in Debian
4. Register a sub domain for free at dyndns.com or zoneedit and update IP.
5. Appease your SELinux
6. Make HTTP a trusted service in your firewall
7. Visit you site through a proxy, else if you type your URI in your web browser it will point to your router.

If you still cannot access your site, Happy debugging!!!!