How to host your own Website.

 If you want to host or develop websites or both,you need a web server. Windows provides IIS (Internet Information Service) in various versions depending on the Operating System. Unfortunately IIS, by default, is not automatically installed with your OS and you'll have to do it manually.
You can install IIS now on your Windows XP Pro or Windows Server 2003 just following the instructions below:

1. 1 Go to Start/Control Panel/Add o Remove Programs
   


2. 2 on Add o Remove Programs press ADD or Remove Windows Components on the left pane



3. 3 On the window below select Internet Information Service and tick the box next to it






4. 3 Press Next and follow the instructions.



5. When prompted click finish .

You should have the default directory for the website on c:\inetpub\wwwroot.You can copy and paste your own website in this folder or,if you want a different directory, you'll have to change some setting from the IIS console,but we'll talk about this later.
Now IIS 5.1 is installed on your system,but to get it going you have to configure it following these steps:

1. 1 go to start/Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Internet Information Service








2. 2 Expand Local Computer and Web Sites, Right-Click on Default Website and click Property
   
3. 3 Click on Home Directory tab






4. 4 On LocalPath enter the directory of your website If you don't know        it,click the browse  button and find it on your hard drive
   
   
5. 5 Click on Directory Security






6. 6 Click Edit






7. By default the anonymous access is enabled, if you disable it, anyone trying you access your website will have to provide the username and matching password.
   Here You can set different authentication modes but in this case



8.  Make sure that Windows Authentication Mode is Selected



9.  Now click on Document Tab






10. On the document tab you can specify the Type of document or page that should be recognized as default page or home page when a web browser requests your website For example, if your home page is index.html and somebody types www.maniacomputer.com in a web browser, it will be automatically converted to www.maniacomputer.com/index.html because the page index.html is in the site directory. In other words you must add the name of the page that will be your site homepage to the document tab.



11.  to add a document press add and you'll get something like below:






12. Type the name of the document and press OK
    Then on the document page you'll be able to shift the priority of your document up or down clicking on the arrows.



13. Now try to type either  http//localhost or your server IP Address ( the Lan IP Address) or  your domain name in your browser address bar and you should be able to see your website.



14. You can ask some friend of yours to test, now, if your website is reachable from the net by typing your domain name or IP address on his browser but only if you are connected to the internet directly via modem,If you are using a router,all you need now, is to make your computer visible from the outside world opening the right doors on the router  , go on the next tutorial Configuring your Router