A Question About Hosting A Server On My PC

[Deleted member 44219]

So I’ve recently became interested in hosting my own Sites on my PC. The reason I wanted to do this was because I simply became interested in it and I want to learn Web Technologies like PHP and MySQL. Now just so you know, I'm only doing this for Learning-Purposes and I'll only be using my actual Computer just to learn this stuff. I'm also using WAMP for this.

So the question I have is that if I start up a Server on my PC and visit localhost will People still be able to access it and will my ISP still send a letter telling me to shut it down? I haven't been able to find any answers for this(Or it might be because DuckDuckGo is being evil to me). No matter how hard I looked, I couldn't find any answers. Again, I'm just doing this for Learning-Purposes only.

I'll be thankful for all of your help.

 

[mav3n]

Shouldn't be too hard. Using WAMP is pretty easy and just remember to port forward traffic to your computer on the desired port...80 or 443 for the most part.

Your ISP most likely will not appreciate the fact you're hosting a web server on their service. Most residental services have certain ports closed or will disable your connection. I would brush up on the AUP or TOS for your ISP to find out.

 

[Azareal]

ISPs can be absolutely unpredictable and bandwidth and latency may vary depending on the time of day.

The trickiest part is probably going to be IP Addresses. Many residential services will assign dynamic IPs which means that the IP Address may change once every day to month. It really varies and can be fairly random sometimes.

For a user to access your site, they're going to have to go to the correct IP Address, whether they type this in normally or are directed to the IP mapped to a particular domain name.

There are some DynDNS services which may help with this, although you will still to find some sort of domain or sub-domain to point at it, there are free sub-domains out there, if you look hard enough.

And if you're playing around, then I would probably go in the direction of something a bit more interesting than PHP like Go or Node or Python, but that's just me. They tend to have the most modern and interesting features. You might even be able to do AI.

Do note that Go in a way has some similarities to C (e.g. pointers, highly performant closer to the metal data-structures, etc.), so prior programming experience is strongly advised before diving into it. If you do have it, then it takes about a day to get going.

It can beat the living hell out of Node / Python performance-wise and it tends to be a bit ahead of them on some things like HTTP/3 and even has some analytics databases written in it. You can also write games on it, Python and JavaScript.

Python is usually a pretty good beginner language and it has it's own flourishing ecosystem and Node is basically the supreme ruler of the web right now. Giants like Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, etc. are investing heavily in it.

If the amount of traffic is really low, then the ISP probably won't care.
They mostly care if it starts creating problems for them.
Please note however that if it's against their ToS, then they're fully in their rights to smack you on the head, if you don't comply with their rules.

 

[Deleted member 44219]

I forgot to put this in my Original Post but what about the Costs? To my knowledge, it will get pretty expensive by hosting a Site on my Computer.

 

[edenwax]

I forgot to put this in my Original Post but what about the Costs? To my knowledge, it will get pretty expensive by hosting a Site on my Computer.

How so? If you're just serving web pages there shouldn't be a noticeable jump in bandwidth. I guess it depends on your ISP and how much bandwidth you average every month vs your cap (if any).

The trickiest part is probably going to be IP Addresses. Many residential services will assign dynamic IPs which means that the IP Address may change once every day to month. It really varies and can be fairly random sometimes.

For a user to access your site, they're going to have to go to the correct IP Address, whether they type this in normally or are directed to the IP mapped to a particular domain name.

There are some DynDNS services which may help with this, although you will still to find some sort of domain or sub-domain to point at it, there are free sub-domains out there, if you look hard enough.

This is absolutely right.

Honestly I'd recommend spending the $5 a month to get a Linode VPS or Digital Ocean droplet and learn how to run a LAMP server to start.

 

[Azareal]

There is one thing I should probably mention which I forgot yesterday.

PHP and Rails have a lot of issues with Windows, so you're likely to wrestle with it to get it to work, other more modern and more general languages tend to work a lot better out of box without hassle.

Generally speaking, stacks dedicated to writing server-side apps / websites will lean towards Linux and not really bother so much with Windows. This goes from the language to even the libraries written in it.

Discourse's developers used to develop in a local virtual machine for this very reason.
It was even the main recommendation for developing Discourse, until Docker came along.

Honestly I'd recommend spending the $5 a month to get a Linode VPS or Digital Ocean droplet and learn how to run a LAMP server to start.

I think he's asking this because he's a teenager incapable of moving funds.

 

[edenwax]

There is one thing I should probably mention which I forgot yesterday.

PHP and Rails have a lot of issues with Windows, so you're likely to wrestle with it to get it to work, other more modern and more general languages tend to work a lot better out of box without hassle.

Generally speaking, stacks dedicated to writing server-side apps / websites will lean towards Linux and not really bother so much with Windows. This goes from the language to even the libraries written in it.

Discourse's developers used to develop in a local virtual machine for this very reason.
It was even the main recommendation for developing Discourse, until Docker came along.

Honestly I'd recommend spending the $5 a month to get a Linode VPS or Digital Ocean droplet and learn how to run a LAMP server to start.

I think he's asking this because he's a teenager incapable of moving funds.

Ahh that makes sense.

 

[DipityTwo]

Website hosting is more accessible than ever before in the history of the internet. There's no need to be a programming genius or a code expert. As a matter of fact, you don't need to know any of that. With the customer support capabilities and instant information access, anyone can get a website started.

 

[Hostforweb Inc]

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