Website from home?

[DBD]

Hi guys

I would like to make a website in the future. I don't know anything about making a website, So I need to start learning

I want a simple website that I can post pictures and movies on, For friends and family to view.

I have a cable modem, Can I run a website from a computer at my house? What specs would my PC need to be?

What kind of software would I need?

Thanks

 

[starkmann]

As a far as I can tell, you have two different issues.

Making a website: Probably the easier part. You can start simple with a blogger website. It's all built and you just fill in the posts. Later, you can purchase a domain and pay a host. You can run your own site with blogs, forums, static pages, whatever.

Hosting a website from home: I'm playing with this now, a lot of guys on this site can help you more than I can there. Yeah, can run it from home, you need an always on and always online computer. As far as I know, it doesn't neccessarily need to be a dedicated server.

So if you go with my theory, start simple with blogger, short learning curve. Then work on learning actual page design (XHTML, Javascript, so on). Then more dynamic pages (php, MySQL).Finally hosting (apache).

 

[DBD]

Thanks starkman

The main reason I want to have a website on a PC at my house is...

I ride dirtbikes and I have a helmet cam, I made some videos, But when I uploaded them to photobucket, They turned into low quality unwatchable garbage So I checked out some other video hosting websites and they all seem to have super low quality standards for the videos you can upload

My understanding about a home website is, You don't have any restrictions on video quality, photo sizes, or bandwidth(up to what my cable modem can run)

I have downloaded files from the Internet at 1,000kbs, dose this mean, (If I have a home website) My friends can download videos from my PC at 1,000kbs?

I know absolutely nothing about HTML, javascript or any other computer code. Can I just use, Website creation software?
http://website-creation-software-review.toptenreviews.com/


Thanks

 

[Greg]

I have downloaded files from the Internet at 1,000kbs, dose this mean, (If I have a home website) My friends can download videos from my PC at 1,000kbs?

No, your upload speed will be much slower than your download.

You can host a site off of any computer that is running Apache (Google it).

As for making the website, if you are just starting you could use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor such as FrontPage.

You can host files of any size, although if they are too big they will take a long time for others to download, especially if you have a slow upload speed.

 

[Shannon]

If you know absolutely nothing about HTML or anything else, then that's what you want to start learning. check out http://www.w3schools.com for great guides and tutorials. Start with HTML and CSS.

You can use software, but it's usually not as useful if you don't know anything about websites yet. If you want to try one, go download the open source web editor, NVU at http://www.nvu.com

You probably don't want to try to serve the site from your house. Web servers are usually kept at data centers with consistent upstream speed and bandwidth. You can download at 1mb at your house, but I would guess that you can only upload at like 256mb/s or something like that. It would not be very fast or reliable, and if you intend to serve videos it would definitely not be the best option.

Another question would be about the videos; what format are they in? what resolution? about how big are they? if you just want to send your friends videos you could use one of the many file uploading sites. My current favorite is http://www.gigasize.com

To have your own website, you don't have to host it from your home. You can get the same lack of restrictions on the type/size of video and stuff that you upload, and you'd get better bandwidth if you get some space on a web server.

If you want to play around with it first, you can check out some of the free servers available, though there may be ads or other restrictions it would help you get an idea of what it's like. Check out http://www.free-webhosts.com to find one to try out. I'd say to look for one with FTP access and php support.

You can also buy a domain and get some web space to call your own. Some popular web hosts include LunarPages and BlueHost

 

[Kubel]

Hosting at home is easy:

1) Sign up for, download, and install the No-IP client. This will point your dynamic IP address to a static domain name.
http://www.no-ip.com/services/managed_dns/free_dynamic_dns.html

2) Download and install AppServ. This includes the server software needed to host files.
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/appserv/appserv-win32-2.5.7.exe?download

3) Open port 80 on your firewall or router.

4) Put your files you want to host in c:\AppServ\www\ and visit your site by typing in either your no-ip domain, localhost, or your ip address.

Your visitors will be limited by your maximum upload speed. To find out what this is, you can go to a speed test site:

http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

After the test completes, your upload speed will be in the right box. You can divide that by 8 to convert from kilobits (kb) to kilobytes (KB). Most browsers display download speed in kilobytes. Anyway, that number will be the speed that your visitors can expect to download files at.

 

[DBD]

Thanks for all the info guys and girls

I will be back in a couple days, with more questions after I study all the links.

Thanks again!!

 

[starkmann]

Not trying to be a jerk but you may be in a bit over your head. Break your project down to bite sized pieces and then go after them one at a time.
1) Learn to write the pages - you can use a WYSIWYG editor if you want but as a representative of the kind of people you wil be asking to clean up what it breaks, please don't
2) Get a host and host your page without a few of the bells and whistles
3) Continue to add features to your site as you learn about hosting from home
4) Purchase whatever will be your server and set it up
5) Host from home with bells and whistles

total time, probaably 2 years depending on your resolve and other schedule.

 

[mBernhardt]

Keep in mind that some ISP's will block inbound port 80. So you will need to do a port 80 redirect. (No-Ip.com can do this for you.)

On your end you will either need to configure your server to run on a different port or redirect the redirected port back to port 80 on the webserver.

I've got a webserver than runs on this exact setup. I have a URL that redirects to it, but most people just access it driectly by it's IP Address.

I'd be happy to answer any specific questions once you get running.