“This account has been suspended,” read my index page for more than a week. Non-payment, of course. I was tired of it, paying for a pointless service with only the perk of cPanel. I had heard that getting started with your own server was a pain… or so that’s what the hosts wanted me to believe. I dug further into the catacombs of the Internet (actually, just Google groups) and discovered the holy grail of information to get started - an essential read - something that actually lays things out in black and white. An omen? An answer to my prayers? Quite possibly. Or maybe it’s just a resource by the gifted few to the starving masses. Whatever the heck it is, I’ll take it!

But, throwing the (possibly?) meaningful and theoretical garbage aside, let’s take a look at what we’re actually talking about. Underneath my genius alliteration (the meaning of genius is open ended for the purposes of this article), I was simply talking about creating your own perfectly operational and stable Windows server. No messing with the Linux shell, no messing with CHMOD permissions (however handy they may be), and no learning curve on a new operating environment. Setting up an Apache server is a snap.

Necessities? A cable, DSL or T1 Internet connection, a reasonably fast and stable system, and the drive to set this sucker up. Described in this full-featured manual are the full steps needed to create a server to rival those of your hosting provider. This marvelous resource is located here and explains how to manually build a server from nothing on top of your Windows 2000 or XP operating system. In most instances, it even describes how to compile various services such as PHP and Perl from scratch - although this is not necessary as of late because most of these services come in wizard driven install packages.

Once you’ve completed the arduous (not really, but that’s what you’ll tell your friends) task of setting up your super server, you’ll have a complete WAMP server. Of course, I’m only playing off the LAMP project which is Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. WAMP would be Windows, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. In fact, you may even add another P on there, for Perl. Try saying WAMPP five times fast, or just use it as your new catch phrase on IRC… I don’t care - the point is, it’s so simple to set up, I’m surprised more people don’t try this out!

Keep in mind, however, than many ISPs are now employing the practice of blocking port 80 (the standard port used for HTTP requests), so, if you want to direct anyone to see your served up pages, and your ISP blocks port 80, try setting the listening port to 8080 in the Apache config file and telling people to go to http://your-domain-or-ip:8080. I’ve found that that method works every time, and if you get another domain, just mask the ugly 8080 with the other domain.

Well, I’m off to serve up some more fresh pages, hot off my fully functional WAMP server!

In WAMPP we trust,
Jared Hudgins