Hosting website on old pc

[Kidplayer_666]

So, just for the sake of experience, how can I host a simple website out of an old unused laptop. Since I’m quite a noob please be simplistic while talking to me

[Kon-Tiki]

Generally what you'll need is some pieces of server software. Depending on what you want to do, starting out with a LAMP server I would consider a good idea. LAMP is the acronym for Linux (operating system), Apache (web server), MySQL (database), PHP/ Perl/ Python. With that you have a basic collection of software to deploy your system.

 

On top of the mentioned there is some more software you might want to look at which (more or less, depending on the software) relies on the LAMP software. This extra software could be (for instance) Docker (a system for using containerized software) and a CMS (Content Management System) like Wordpress or Joomla to build and manage more advanced websites without tons of programming.

 

That covers the very basics. As an OS  for servers I like centOS and openSUSE a lot. Particularly the latter one has quite a lot of graphical tools to monitor and configure your system, notably also the server component. For remotely monitoring the server "cockpit" is a nice tool.

 

I hope that gives you a basis to start with

 

Good luck and enjoy the tinkering

 

PS.: Should you not be able to access a certain service, check the firewall. That drove me crazy when I first started with networking

[IgorM]

1 hour ago, Kidplayer_666 said:

So, just for the sake of experience, how can I host a simple website out of an old unused laptop. Since I’m quite a noob please be simplistic while talking to me

To sum up you just have to install an OS (I would recommend a linux distro with a GUI to start, maybe Ubuntu or Debian), then install a web server program like Apache or Nginx, with that you can host a simple static html web page on you local network. If you want to make it accessible from the internet you have to set up something called port forwarding on your router so you can use your external IP to get to your website. Here is a basic tutorial on it 

 

[Jarsky]

Assuming you're talking PHP or HTML

 

If you're running Windows, just install WampServer http://www.wampserver.com

If you're running Linux, install CentOS, Debian or Ubuntu and run a script like this: https://github.com/teddysun/lamp

 

Then forward port 80 on your router to the system running your webserver. 

If you're using SSL then port 443 as well. Then you need to also consider perhaps using LetsEncrypt as its free, and setting up CertBot.