ThoughtShapes Shaping Ideas With Thought

The first thing you'll want to do is to set up a domain. If you don't own a domain yet, I recommend www.dyndns.com, mostly because this is the company you will be dealing with in this tutorial in terms of self hosting--so why not go through the same company for all your needs? Also, although I didn't get my domain via dyndns.com, based on what I've read they have some nice tools available to manage your domain. If you don't want to go through dyndns.org for either purchasing a domain and/or self-hosting your site, then feel free to use other services--the concepts in this tutorial will still apply.

Part of what I discuss will apply only if you have a web site currently hosted by a hosting company, but all in all this tutorial will get you up and running with self-hosting whether you already have a site that is hosted or whether you just have a domain name with no web site yet. For those that do have a site hosted by a company there is a decent chance that you have an email address handled by that company's email server, and consequently you'll either want to continue letting the hosting company handle that email address for you or you'll want to host your own email server. I won't yet get into the details of hosting your own email server--there will be time for that later...first things first. Based on my own experience, I'd say that making sure there is a seamless handling of your email is the trickiest part of hosting your own site, but if you are given the details up front it is easy.

You need a company like dyndns.com so that you can utilize a dynamic IP address that your ISP (Internet Service Provider such as Comcast, Verizon, etc.) provides you with. Because most often the IP address an ISP provides you with is dynamic, without a service like dyndns there would be no easy way to make sure that visitors are sent to your site when they try to access it--because your IP address might change from time to time. If you've monitored your IP address it may seem as though most cable, DSL, or FIOS ISP providers leave you with the same IP address for quite some time, but it is changed from time to time and so therefore you can't rely on it always being the same. Imagine that your phone number had the possibility of being changed from time to time and how difficult it would be for people to reach you--and, unfortunately, this is the very same situation we have to deal with in terms of hosting your own site. Dyndns offers a service that sits between your IP address and users of your web site, because you end up registering dyndns as the name server for your domain. This means that when users type in a URL in a browser that is supposed to bring them to your site (such as http://www.thoughtshapes.com), dyndns is contacted in order to resolve that name to an IP address. In behind the scenes you will run free software on the computer that runs your web site, and that software communicates to dyndns anytime your IP address changes--and then dyndns updates its records to point to that new IP address. So, when an Internet surfer requests a page from your site, they come to dyndns and dyndns says, "Okay, you're looking for the IP address of a site that I'm a name server for? Here it is!" Since dyndns is updated when your own IP address changes, it is always able to give back the right IP address when an Internet surfer requests something from your site.

Note: Some ISP services offer a static IP address, like FIOS at the time of writing this. If you can get such a service, you do not need to use DynDns because your IP address will not change. However, one thing to keep in mind is that if you do end up changing services at some point, the service you change to might not offer a static IP address.

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