Running a server at home - help please
 

Guys, I do a lot of work with a local motor club with a fairly active BBS. The last two hosts have been pretty flakey, and the question has been asked as to what would be involved to run our own server with the BBS software and mail running on it.

Can anyone give me a simple guide as to what I need and how to do it?

Thanks,
Simon.

Hello

Setting up a Webserver is easy, literally all you do (if you have XP Pro) is turn on IIS, put some HTML pages in c:\Inetpub\wwwroot\ and you are done.

If you do not have XP Pro, you can use Apache (example here: http://www.lifehacker.com/software/f...ver-124212.php) .

You really need to have a static IP address as that makes life easier. Then you can just route your domain to your IP.

Why do you need mail on your PC, setting up a SMTP server is a bit more complicated?

Steve

Hi steve, thanks for the quick reply.

I didn't realise it was that easy. I'm guessing we'd be best to run a dedicated pc that isn't affected by the firewall?

The email situation has been causing similar probs to the BBS- its been down for several days and they're hoping to get it back up and running today, but the host can't tell us if we've lost the mail yet. Maybe we should run a catch-all through a reliable host and sort locally with something like vpop3 or something that even a total idiot like me can configure ;)

be careful you don't fall foul of your ISP's acceptable use policy.

An option would be to try one of the US-based bulletin board providers... http://www.phpwebhosting.com for example. $9.95 per month and no bandwidth overheads

Its not quite as simple as above...

XP isnt really any good for hosting a server, its a desktop pc operating system, and as some people will say not the best either..

For hosting a web server on windows I would look at using windows 2003 server Web edition.

You can get away with it on 'standard edition or enterprise' but you need to harden it properly.

The web site must be behind a firewall.. normally in a DMZ, then only pass port 80 for web traffic, 443 for ssl, 25 for mail.

For DNS if its just to play with go to www.dyndns.org and register there.. (fortunatley my router updates my records!)

It is no way any good to host at home, you wont be able to support the OS well enough, nor will you have the bandwidth required (check your contention ratio)

David

As above - simply find a better hosting company. You don't want the headache of managing an internet connected device that is designed to allow people to connect to it without a full understanding of what security you need to apply, maintain and constantly re-engineer. And if you understood what you needed to do (no disrespect!), you wouldn't mind paying 30 quid a month for someone else to do it :D

Fair enough, will find a better host. Thanks for the advice :)

have a look at the personal package at www.34sp.com they are good and cheap (and no I don't work for them).

There are lots out there just I only heard good things about these guys.