Well, there you have it! We have gone through the entire process of setting up a web server. Remember the problems we set out to solve?

1. Web Space
Now that your home PC is a server, you have all the space in the world!

2. Free Domain Names
Thanks to No-IP, you didn’t pay a cent to get your name on the net

3. Web Hosting Basics
If you keep playing around with the settings on Abyss, you will know it inside and out in a matter of minutes.

This article takes into consideration that you are already running ads on eBay in which you can get your HTML from, or are experienced with HTML. For this reason, we will not go too in depth on how to build a complicated web page, but guide you through getting your first simple web page completed and showing to the public. I do, however, provide some links to some excellent resources.

CoffeeCup HTML

First, you are going to need an HTML editor of some kind. If you don’t have one, we have provided a link below to a program called CoffeeCup HTML. Click on the link and install the software. You will need to find the “Download Now” link next to “The HTML Editor” title.

www.articleautomate.com/coffeecup

Once you have installed your CoffeeCup, run it. A screen similar to this will open:

We will quickly go over how you can make your home page:

1. Click “File,” then “New”.
2. Select “Blank HTML File,” and click “Open”.
3. Between the “

” and “” tags, type, “Hi! Welcome to my web site!”.
4. Click “File,” then “Save As”.
5. Navigate to “c:article”.
6. Type “index.html” in the “File Name” textbox, the click “Save”.

Note: You will lose the existing “index.html” file unless you rename it.

7. Overwrite any existing date in this directory.
8. Open up you web browser and enter your “yourname.no-ip.com” address in to the address bar.

What just happened? Lets hope you get your new welcome page. It would seem that you have just completed setting up your web server and creating its default page. Now all you have to do is place your article in its appropriate directory, in this case the “Widgets” directory, and create a link to it in your home page.

HTML Resources

I’m sure you will need some help developing the rest of your website, so I have given you some resources to do just that. You can check out the following resources below:

Learn How to Build Your Own Website
www.articleautomate.com/novacorp

Helping Websites Create Content Fast
www.articleautomate.com/webcontent

Step by Step Websites in 3-6 Hours
www.articleautomate.com/dwhelp

You don’t need to set up a web server in order to automate the delivery of your information products. This section is for people who don’t want to pay a cent for hosting their downloadable information products and web sites. Hosting your own web pages gives you much more hard drive space and easier control of your HTML documents. This section will also go over typical issues when setting up a web server and a solution for each issue.

Internet Service Providers (ISP’s)

Here is a little information on most Internet Service Providers (ISP’s). If you’re on a basic ADSL or Cable package, then chances are you have some restrictions on your Internet account. Common limitations are certain port blockages, and IP address assignment process. First, let’s look at ports.

Ports

Ports are used for communication on the Internet. There are a lot of them, and knowing what they all do is not important for this document. What is important is that your ISP may be blocking you from accepting requests on port 80, which is the HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) port. HTTP allows you to surf the Internet. If you look at the address bar on your browser, you will always see “HTTP”. This means that you can access the Internet on an outgoing basis, but you can’t accept incoming HTTP connections. Why? Think of your ISP as doing you a favor. By blocking port 80, they are eliminating the chance of your computer from ACCEPTING viruses, spyware, and all sorts of other malicious activity. The problem is, this also blocks your ability of accepting other HTTP (port 80) requests, therefore preventing you from being a web server. To find out if your port 80 is blocked, you will either have to go to your ISP’s web site and find your license agreement, or call their technical support line and ask. Either way, this problem is easily solved in the next few pages. We will now move on to the next issue, IP Address Assignment.

IP Address Assignment

An IP (Internet Protocol) address is a unique identifier that gives your computer a “home” on the World Wide Web. Most basic Internet packages, including all dial-up connections, work on a dynamic IP address assignment process. The problem this causes is that if your IP address is always changing, how is anyone supposed to find your “home”? It would be like you lived in your house for 5 hours, and then left. Even your trusty mailman would get confused! One solution is to call your ISP and get your Internet package upgraded to a business plan, which will change your IP from dynamic to static, but at an extra cost. The other is to use a great free tool that we will explain in the next section.

To find out your IP address, click “Start”, then Run, type “Command”, click “OK”. When the black window, known as the “Command” window opens, type “ipconfig /all”. This will yield your current IP configuration. If you see a line that says “Lease Expires”, and it’s soon, then you definitely have a dynamic IP. Don’t worry if it expires soon, you’ll get a new one as soon as it does. You will also notice a 4-octet number, seperated by 3 periods next to its appropriate description, “IP Address”. This is your IP address.

No-IP.com

Who is No-IP?

These guys are great!

Before we get into it, lets define what a domain name is. A domain name is a alphanumeric representation of your IP address. In other words, any “www” name you enter into your address bar actually reflects an IP address. If you open up your command window again and type “ping www.articleautomate.com”, you will notice there is an IP
address in square brackets next to my domain name in the results.

Now, let’s move on.

First, No-IP will give you a web name and you don’t even have to pay for it! That means you don’t have to purchase a domain name. Any “www” address you see in your address bar is a domain name. When you use No-IP.com, you will receive a domain name that looks like www.yourname.no-ip.com. Notice the “no-IP” part. Since No-IP.com is a free service, they add that to your “www” name. This is fine because the purpose of your site is to serve your articles to your customers through your eBay and Paypal “Instant Purchase” sales, although you can also serve web pages. Your domain name also remains easy to remember.

Second, your dynamic IP address issue simply disappears. No-IP.com has developed a free piece of software that you download from them and install on your PC. What it does is monitor your IP address, and when your IP changes, it tells the No- IP.com server, which updates your “www” name to reflect your new IP address.

No-IP.com Registration

Now that you understand what No-IP is, you are ready to go out and get registered. Click the link below, find their “Sign-up Free” link, and fill in the blanks.

www.articleautomate.com/no-ip

Once you have fully registered, you will receive a confirmation email. Follow the directions on the email. Next, log into your No-IP.com account, and click on the “Add” link under the “Hosts/Redirects” header.

The “Hostname” textbox is where you will enter your “www” name, and the dropdown is the No-IP.com extension of your choice.

If your ISP does not block port 80 then you don’t need to do any port redirecting. Just click the “Create Host” button at the bottom of the page.

If your ISP does block port 80 then click on the “Port 80 Redirect”. A new page will load, but will look almost the same. For the “Port”, enter 8000. Click the “Create Port Redirect” at the bottom of the page.

Registration is complete – on to the software!

Click on the “Downloads” tab at the top and then click “Windows” on the left column. Click on the No-IP DUC v x.x.x link. (x.x.x because the version is always changing)

Follow the wizard to install the program. Once installation is complete, you will be prompted for the email address and password you entered during registration. After entering this, the console will open. Turn to the next page to see what your console will look like.

Notice the smiley face. That means the No-IP.com server has been updated with your current IP address.

Now that you have your domain name set up, you have to start hosting your pages! The next section will introduce you to an excellent program called Abyss Web Server by Aprelium.

Abyss Web Server

What is Abyss?

Simply put, Abyss is a free personal web server for Windows, MacOS X, Linux, and FreeBSD. Abyss is just a web server, and does not allow for any FTP protocol. You can access your console remotely to update directory and user settings, but you can’t upload any files unless you are at the computer running the web server.

Installation

Click on the following link:
www.articleautomate.com\abyss

Find the “Download” link under the “Software Resources” header near the bottom of the page. Click on the “Download Abyss Web Server X1 for Windows” link and install the software.

Once the installation is complete, you will be asked for a username and a password. This identifier will then be your login to your web server. You will also see the Abyss icon in your system tray. After entering your login info, you will be prompted again for a username and password. You will always be prompted for your login information with this screen whenever you start your console.

You should get a console that looks something like this:

Do not change the “Server Root”. This is where your web server runs.

Change your “Documents Path” to the path you wish to host your pages from. For this book, I will use “c:\article”.

If your “Port” isn’t already set to 8000, do that now.

Any changes that you make will require a server restart, which is nothing more than clicking a button when you are prompted.

If you ever need to access your console again, right click on the Abyss icon in the system tray, and select “Show Console”. Please take into consideration that we have only skimmed the surface with Abyss Web Server and that there is much more to learn about it, such as setting up directory and user permissions, and your access statistics.

We will now move on to a “suggested” method of setting up your web server directory.

Directory Structure

Before you start creating HTML and putting your article online, you may want to look at how you want your web server’s file system to be set up. I have found that it is easier to maintain when you have the following setup: For this example, I have set my “Documents Path” to c:\article. To create a directory, read “Directory Creation”.

Take a look at the image below:

You will notice that we are in the article directory, and there is an index.htm file. This file will be your website’s home page. Next, you will see an images folder and a widgets folder. You will store all of your website’s images in the image folder. The widgets folder will contain another “index.html” file, which will contain the download link to your article.

Directory Creation

To create your “article” directory:

1. Right-Click the “Start” menu.
2. Click on “Explore”.
3. Navigate through the tree until you find “C:” and click on it.
4. In the right window pane, right-click on some white-space, and select “New”, then “Folder”.
5. Name your folder “article”.

Follow this process to create your “images” and “widgets” directory. We will look at creating your “index.html” file in Section 4 or this article.

Test Your Server

Next, test your server. Run the “ipconfig” command, and write down your IP address. Open a new web browser and in the address bar type: yo.ur.ip.addy:8000/

If you get the Paypal button you created and tested earlier, you have correctly installed Abyss. Notice the “8000”. This directs the website to your port 8000. If you decide to run your server on a different port, you will need to change this figure to be the same.

Now try your No-IP domain name “http://yourname.no-ip.com”. Notice that your address bar changes to your IP address?

If you don’t want the address to change to your IP, then you will have to log into your No-IP account and edit your Host settings from “Port 80 Redirect” to “DNS Host,” but the difference will be that your domain will look like www.yourname.no-ip.com:8000.

Troubleshooting

If you experience problems, such as “error 404 - Page cannot be found”, then try some of these suggestions:

1. Make sure there is an “index.html” file in your “c:\article” directory.
2. Make sure your “Documents Path” is set to “c:\article”
3. Make sure you see the following icons in your system tray (bottom right):
4. Make sure your web address DOES NOT contain a “WWW” in it. It should follow this exact protocol: yourname.no-ip.com.

If all none of these suggesstions work, the following link:
www.articleautomate.com/serverhelp

Audience

This article has been written for:

• Amateur web developers
• People who want to learn about web hosting

Problems We Are Solving

Have you ever encountered a need for more web space to find that a measly 100MBs will cost you hundreds of dollars?

This article will help you save your money by not having to buy web space. You will have whatever your hard disk size is for space. In other words, your web space allowance is virtually unlimited.

How do I get a free domain name?

You will be shown a hidden gem on the Internet. You will set up your own unique domain name, where from there, you can start serving your customers.

Where do you start if you want to learn the basics of web hosting?

Right here! This article will allow you to set up your own web server with step- by-step instructions. These instructions have been tested on MY PARENTS. Trust me, if they can do it, so can you!

Authoring Your Own Information Product

Writing an article is amazingly fun. Just telling all your friends and family that your writing an article will amaze them at how brilliant you are.

If you don’t feel like writing an article at this time, you can always purchase one that has full resale rights. You can find them anywhere on eBay. Search for “article resale.” You will find lots of opportunity there.

Below are a few resources you can use to help you with your article writing and search process:

“How To Create Your Own Info Product”
www.articleautomate.com/createinfo

“Make Money Giving Away Free articles”
www.articleautomate.com/bizzydays

“Ultimate Auction articles For eBay Success”
www.articleautomate.com/vnotions

“Mini article Secrets”
www.articleautomate.com/chiaewen

“What’s the Best Product to Sell Online?”
www.articleautomate.com/whattosell

Our Case Study

Let’s set up a scenario. Say you have an article you want to sell on how to make a widget. You are going to need to find a way to market and deliver your product to your customer, give them a spot to download it from, and host the web pages associated with selling your product. Typically, this would mean that you would have to go out and purchase a domain name, buy some server space to host your pages from, and then purchase an auto-responder program that will deliver your product to your customer. As you can see, this can seem quite overwhelming. Where do you start? How much will it cost? Well, the good news is that there is no cost associated with any of this.