several factors need to be considered when hosting your own website that will determine what you will need.

Traffic is probably the most important factor, if you want to get a high traffic flow or know your site will achieve a large number of page views you will want a stand alone system for it. If you are simply running a basic html site with no dynamic content and it is reasonably low traffic, google a free application called abyss webserver, once installed all you need to do is drop html files into the htdocs folder and they will be live to the net from your IP. If you have a router you will need to set up a virtual server or forward port 80 or what ever port you are serving on for the pages to be visible, I will go into this is further depth in another post.

Lets presume you want to use a stand alone PC or proper server hardware to host your site (server hardware post here) I would reccommend you install Apache webserver, MySQL and PHP 5, this is actually much easier than you might think. Go to http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html#641 and download the full windows version (installer link currently XAMPP for Windows 1.6.2 @ 2007/05/29) other OS versions available there also, and install this into its own folder in root like c:/xampp (NOTE: dont use program files folder) Follow the instructions carefully on this page and in a few minutes you will have the worlds most popular webserver 'Apache' with MySQL and PHP 5 installed, all free.

As you will read on that page there are some security issues that need to be addressed, so set passwords as indicated at the bottom of the page, make sure you remember them as you will use them later to connect to the database

Next, rather than giving out your IP to everyone so they can see your site you will need a free shortcut url. If you have a dynamic IP you will want one that provides you with a dynamic update client (DUC). You can get these free from http://www.dyndns.com/ or http://www.no-ip.com/ The DUC monitors your IP (if you have a dynamic IP), when it detects it has changed it sends the new IP to their server and your shortcut url is updated in about 5 mins, this means your shortcut url eg. www.yoursitename.no-ip.com will always point at your PC and ultimately your htdocs in your Apache webserver.

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