If you are planning to develop a web site, with transactional
support under a Microsoft Platform, here it is a few points you must focus in..
Target or audience (how many concurrent users will connect
to your server). Less or more than 10. This will tell you which Operating
System version you must install.
Static or dynamic content.
Data Access (If it is required or not)
User friendly internet address (IP or domain name)
Content weight (heavy downloads or just html content)
Security: You will enable private zones (user & pass
required)
Vulnerabilities: Check the Server weakness with the oficial
software manufacturer documentation.
With this topics in mind you will ask the question: Is really
the most convinient, install a web server at home?
If your answer is yes, it is because you have resolved a good percentage of this
points.
Tools:
Broadband internet access: Ask to your ISP for the
downstream and upstream speeds. Your clients will get data connections at your
upstream speed.
Server/s: MS Windows 2K Server or Win2K Pro with IIS in
both cases. Hardware requirement considerations taking in mind your
application workload.
Knowledge of HTML, Java as well as Microsoft ASP programing
languages.
Knowlegde about Networking if you need to mount a LAN to
support a backend server. (Database dedicated server). If the application does
not require a huge processing workload, both.. web server anda database server
could reside on the same server. This is not a very good practice, but it
could cover your initial concept test.
Domain name: If your ISP does not provide you an static
public IP address, this mean you have a dynamic public IP... you could use
some dynamic DNS service like www.no-ip.com
or DNS2Go. So you can have Online visibility with a public domain name, not
the yours one, but a public domain at least.
If your web site content is heavy, and you expect to have a
lot of concurrent users connected, the web server at home it is not a good
choice.
You must enable secure access to some parts of your web
site, aplying security policies at Folder and file level, this is possible
with IIS 5.0 integrated to a Win2K domain - e.g: Digest Authentication - (big
work). Or managing your own security access philosophy based in your database,
including a the header of all your "secured" files a call to a session check
for authentication. Programming stuff...
Aply the security patchs that every Operating System has,
included Linux, if you choose this one.
More tools:
Graphic designer tool, like fireworks from Macromedia.
Frontpage or Visual Interdev (VB if you need to write some
encapsulated components).
MS Access or SQL Server. Knowlegde of ODBC access. There is
a lot of information about this, a good start point could be:
http://www.w3schools.com
