Today I am starting a web server setup series. In this series of articles, I’ll teach you how you can setup a web server or turn your own computer into a web server. I’ll also teach you how you can manage your web server, increase server security and guard it against specific types of attacks.
I published an article in 2016 in which I talked about turning a personal computer or laptop into a web server. It worked for almost all and so many people appreciated it. But that was just for fun. One can not start his/her own web hosting business following that article. In this series, I’ll show you how one can even provide web hosting services right from home and believe me, it’s not going to be tough.
What you should know for this series
What is better than Linux for managing web servers? Obviously nothing. But for some, it may be the only difficult thing in this series to understand the commands as all other stuff is easy. But do not worry just a very little knowledge will be enough for setting up a web server but you’ll need to learn Linux to securely manage your servers.
Few related terms that you should know –
IP Address
To better understand how we set up our own web server, it’s important to know what IP Addresses are. Let’s understand IP Address again in that same old fashion but it works. Like each house in our country has an address. If we invite somebody home and he does not know where our home is, we tell them the physical address of our home. Right? Devices talk to each other in the same manner. Each device has an address which is IP Address.
For example, when we type www.facebook.com, the request is sent to IP address of the machine which is hosting facebook.com.
DNS
If you read what I told above about IP addresses, then you might be asking who the hell tell which domain name belongs to which IP Address. Well, that’s where the DNS comes in.
The DNS has all the information about the specific domain you type. But it’s difficult for one DNS to store and deliver millions of requests at the same time. So we have got many DNS servers divided into regions and extensions. So we may have a DNS taking care of .com extension and another for .org and so on. This way the problem gets resolved. So now see you in the next article.