OK, Im no PC virtuoso but I am no idiot either. I have read everything available online and from XPs help screens with no progress.
I am trying to host a website from my home usung XP Pro. I know this is possible, but I am getting nowhere. I bought a domain name from GoDaddy.com and have installed the IIS portion of windows. So, rather than tell what Ive doen and what had failed Ill just ask and hope for the best, What do I need to do from start to finnish to get my site up and running?
Nothing fancy, just to access pictures, videos, files etc… from the internet via the domain I bought, ChristopherG.com
There are too many variables and decisions to be made for anyone to just hand this to you in a “do it exactly this way fashion”.
I am assuming you can successfully reach your home website via http://localhost. I’m also assuming you know how to create your own website, so that your question is really how to do you point your domain name to your computer?
The best way to do this for your ISP to create DNS entries for your computer, and to register those DNS servers as authoritative for your name with GoDaddy.Com. That won’t happen without you shelling out for a business account.
The next best thing is to use domain forwarding from GoDaddy - this basically redirects requests for your domain name to some other address which you specify. My DNS servicer (buydomains.com) offers frame forwarding so that users won’t typically even notice that they have been redirecting, I don’t know if GoDaddy does it that way or not.
Of course, you still need a URL to direct them to. I’m assuming you have a dynamic IP address (if it is static, that is you had to type in your IP address yourself then ignore this). What you can do is go to www.dyndns.org and get an account for either dynamic or “static” (depending on how often your IP changes), download one of the utilities they list to monitor your IP address and register the change with them. You will then get a URL that is something like christopherg.dyndns.org. You can then use goDaddy’s URL redirection to redirect www.christopherg.com to christopherg.dyndns.org. Voila.
Your other option is to pay a little bit more to someone like buydomains.com ($16 a year) who will provide DNS services for you. It looks like GoDaddy doesn’t do this but you might dig around a little bit to be sure first - I couldn’t find a reference to it on their site and they specifically talk about configuring your ISP’s DNS.