Thought I’d have a go at hosting a site from one of my home PC’s, just to see how easy or not it is.

For some reason I decided to try on the XP PC and of course that had XP Home on it, which doesn’t have IIS. Don’t know how that got on there as I was pretty sure that my XP disks are all for the Pro version (No doubt some dubious Windows update from Microsoft. Ed). What was even worse was that it had SP3 on XP Home and all of the XP Pro disks I have only include SP2 so there was no way I could do an upgrade from XP Home SP3 to XP Pro SP2. Eventually got the required XP Pro SP3 disk written from an ISO image courtesy of Nero and installed that over XP Home SP3.

All of that took several hours but eventually I was able to install IIS and start that as a service. Tried to load a loopback page and nada. Hmm.. Messed around for a bit with no success so stopped the IIS service and installed XAMPP. That went on easily enough and the Apache service started and I was able to display the loopback page. Generated a ‘Hello World’ PHP page and that was displayed, so that meant PHP was working. Emboldened by that success I saved an already open Word document as a web page, which has an extension of .mht, in the htdocs folder, where Apache looks for pages and that loaded as well.

Tried to create a database with phpMyAdmin and that failed with a horrible error message. Repeated that and got the same error message. I rebooted and had another go at creating a database and this time the critter was created OK. I then started getting another error which I think had something to do with passwords being out of sync. Stuck with that problem right now. Maybe it’s time to RTFM.

When I have sorted that out and have managed to get, or a copy of, the MySQL database that’s behind this blog then I’ll try and host it from home for a couple of days. This version will still be on the hosting site but a copy will be on the XP Pro PC. I think I might have a problem getting a copy of the database from the hosting company as it’s on a different server to where these pages are stored and I’m not convinced I can FTP to it.