Apache, is this what I need?

[Guest_imported]

Hi guy's.. i'm really tired of paying someone else to host my webpage.. i've been doing tests, and messing with apache for the last few days, and have a few questions..

1. would be, is this what I need? If I order a domain from somewhere, and want to be my own server.. is this the program I need?

2. is, does apache support, or have cgi, perl, sql, etc.. support?

3. do you use apache for stuff like SMTP too? or would mail forwarding be a better idea?

4. is this a bad idea on win 98? I did tests and everything worked great.. will there be any complications down the road do you think?

That's all for now I guess! lemme know! Thank's a million.

-Prostorm.net

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

1. Yes, apache is pretty much all you need. Firstly, however, you need a static IP address connected to the internet (from a friendly ISP of your choice) and your domain dns records configured to point at that address.

2. Apache does all that and more. The only area that might be a problem vs IIS is asp but this is only likely to be an issue if your were migrating an existing site that used such pages.

3. Apache is a web server. As such it is directly comparable (favorably!!) to M$ IIS. If you want to host a smtp server you need a package like sendmail.

4. Depends how 'professional' you want it to be ! Win9x is even less secure that NT/W2K and I would most definitely not recommend it in the least as a serious platform on which to run apache, or any internet-connected server for that matter. You can quite happily use if for testing though. Also, apache is primarily linux/unix oriented and you may find you can't get 100% functionality on a windows platform.

Hope this helps