Mountain Lion Server: Web Server

18/01/13 08:51 Filed in: Technology

In this screencast tutorial I cover how to set up the Website service. This service is not only used for hosting your own personal websites. It is also used as a part of making the Wiki Service work so it is a service that will be running whether you are hosting your own website or not. In the screencast I talk about things to consider when hosting your own website including:

1. Does your ISP block port 80?
If your ISP blocks port 80 then you will not be able to host your own website as that is the port that those outside your network will use to access your site. You may have to call your ISP to see if there is a way to open that port. In many cases they will want you to purchase their business internet service which is usually more costly but does come with a static IP address which helps with the next issue.

2. Do you have a static IP address?
If you are using a dynamic IP address, which most home users are, you are leasing an IP address that could change at any moment. Once this IP address changes all of your web services will go offline until you discover the change and update your domain registrar to point your domain name to the new IP address. This will cause your website to be down until you make the change. Now most ISP's don't change the IP that often. It usually happens when you reboot your modem, but the risk of it changing might be too big, especially if you are dependent on having your website up and running 24/7. For home users who are only doing this for family it is not as critical, but for the rest, you really need a static IP.

3. Are you ok with Downtime?
Running a web server that hosts critical websites means that uptime of your sites is up to you and your server. So if you have a power outage and your server goes down, so does your website. If you forget you are hosting a site and turn off your server, you lose your site. So you really need to weigh the costs before you decide to do your own hosting.

Hopefully that gives you some things to consider before hosting your site. In the tutorial I cover how to get your site going and even how to set up virtual hosting if you are looking at hosting various domains/websites on your one server. This includes a look at the DNS service so if you haven't covered that yet, you may want to view my tutorial HERE.

Thanks for watching! If you have any comments or questions leave them here or on my Youtube Channel!

Tags: Mac OSX, Tutorials, Apple, Server, Screencast