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Configuring Your Web Server

Sun, 12/03/2006 - 12:00am — Steve Seymour

The next step in the process of self-hosting your own site is to set up a computer as a web server. To do this on Windows XP Professional or Windows Server 2003, you'll need IIS installed. On Windows XP Professional, you will only have the ability to create a single, stand-alone web site, while Windows Server 2003 allows you to create as many web sites as you'd like to. So, if you want to host multiple domains and you are running Windows XP Professional, you'll need to resort to a redirect script or some other "trickery" to allows users asking for http://www.somedomain.com to go to a different location on your server than those asking for http://www.someotherdomain.com. The rest of this tutorial assumes you are using Windows Server 2003, but other than the instructions for hosting multiple web sites, the details are pretty much the same.

To properly set up your site, you'll want to create a stand-alone web site in IIS (rather than adding a virtual directory under the "Default Web Site" site. To do this, follow these steps (we'll use "somedomain.com" as the domain name for this example):

  1. Open up the IIS management console
  2. Open up the Internet Information Services node on the left
  3. Open up the node representing the computer
  4. You should now see a "Web Sites" folder
  5. Right click on the "Web Sites" folder
  6. Select "Web Site..."
  7. Click next on the web site wizard dialog box
  8. Give your site a description. This name is not overly important, but we suggest giving it the name of your domain (e.g. somedomain)
  9. Accept all the defaults until you get to the Home Directory dialog
  10. Choose the directory of your choice as the home directory.
  11. Choose the permissions that make sense for your site (you can change this later).
  12. Right-click on the web site you created in IIS and select Properties
  13. Select the Web Site tab
  14. Click on the Advanced button
  15. Click on the Add button
  16. Fill in the port you want this site to handle (usually port 80 for a normal web site)
  17. Fill www.somedomain.com in the host header value textbox.
  18. Click OK
  19. Repeat steps 15-16 again, and type in somedomain.com before clicking OK

The above steps, once you are up and running, will allow users to go directly to your site whether they type "http://www.somedomain.com" or "http://somedomain.com". Assigning header values to a site causes IIS to delegate to that site when the header of the request matches any of the site's header values.

At this point, the physical location on the server hosting your site is the path you entered in step 9 above.

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