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Choosing Your Server

By hosting the webserver on your local computer, you gain control of the platform from top to bottom and do away with the constant need to upload the files for your site over the Internet. Chances are that the operating costs will be lower as you are not using many (if any) third-party services.

You can also host the webserver on a remote machine by renting a machine from a cloud service provider (IaaS) such as OVH and Scaleway. Cloud computing offers a high bandwidth and a low latency for your website traffic. Should the need to scale up arise as your website becomes increasingly popular, you can easily form a network of high-end machines remotely and load-balance the site traffic, without much setup or maintenance hassle. Nor will you need to purchase the entire set of expensive hardware upfront. Most providers charge by the hour and allow you to choose your hardware and operating system. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform,and Microsoft Azureare some big names when it comes to cloud computing.

Hosting your web server means that you need to manually make your server reachable anytime on the internet, which is the subject of the next section. The following subsections explain the steps needed to setup a few different popular types of web servers. Bear in mind, however, in practice you need to choose only one type of web server platform.

Make sure the HTTP port (normally 80) has not already been used as you setup a web server. Remember to allow connections to pass through your firewall too.