Serving Yourself

Serving Yourself

If you’re hosting your own Web site, you have to have a computer with a permanent, dedicated connection to the Internet. The speed, or bandwidth, of your connection depends on such factors as how much traffic you expect your Web site to get and how much money you have to spend. For example, a full-time business DSL connection offering standard speeds of about 400 kilobits per second (a kilobit is a thousand bits of datas) costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 a month. A T1 line, at 1.5 Mbps per second, is four times as fast and four times as expensive. If you’re serving a modest little Web site, DSL works just fine, thank you. If you’re running your business online, you have to bite the bullet and get a T1 if you expect more than a few customers at any one time. (A T3 line gives you a speed of 45 Mbps per second. These babies cost at least $10,000 a month, so we figure that you’re not planning to run one to your home computer any time soon.)

After you have your connection squared away, you have to install the software that turns your computer into a Web server. A Web server is simply a computer that hosts Web pages. The Web server computer runs a program that fulfills requests from other computers for Web pages stored on the Web server’s hard drive. A UNIX machine makes a great Web server because the Web was designed using UNIX programs.

For example, John has computer named net.gurus.com on the Internet. It runs Apache (an excellent choice on John’s part because Apache is fast, reliable, and — most important — free). When you view the author team’s Web site, at http://net.gurus.com, your computer sends a request for a Web page to the Apache program on net.gurus.com, and Apache sends the page back to your computer so that you can see it on your screen. We talk more about UNIX Web servers later in this chapter.

After you install a Web server on your UNIX system, you tell the Web server the directory where the Web pages will be stored (the Web directory). You can store Web pages in that directory and its subdirectories. To make a Web page accessible to the world, you create the page with a Web-authoring program (or with any text editor), test it on your own system to avoid embarrassing typos, and move or copy the page to your Web directory. After the page is in the Web directory, anyone can see the page if they know its URL (Web address).

If you’re learning about UNIX to be a Webmaster, you need to know how to

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  Install, configure, and maintain your Web server program

  
  


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  Create and modify Web pages

  
  

If other people will be working on the Web site, too, you have to know how to give them permissions to create and modify the files in the Web directory and its subdirectories. If you want active Web pages with forms and other interaction, you’ll also dabble in the mysteries of server-side includes and CGI scripts. Finally, if you want to add more Internet resources to your Web site, such as e-mail and FTP, you have to learn how to configure your Web server program to provide them. If your Web server program doesn’t offer what you need, you have to cast about for the right software, install it, and configure it.