How to install a Web Server

So you want to learn how to make a website? Well you've come to the right palce. The first thing you will need to set up is your development server. There is often confusion over the meaning of the word 'server'. The word in most conjures images such as this:
Don't be scared off, it's not gonna break the bank to set up your development server. A server is in fact any machine that runs a server application. I'm not sure how that translates in terms of precedence but when I mention a 'server' I'll be referring to a program. You may be asking yourself what does the server do? Good question. The server that we will be using is a HTTP server. HTTP is the protocol, or agreed method of communication, that Web pages are requested with. The server application simply listens on port 80 for HTTP requests and serves the requesting client with what they wanted. You may be asking yourself what a port number is? Good question. It is simply a value attached to the sent data packet that identifies the data as being for use with a certain service such as HTTP servers and clients. There are a number of agreed services and port numbers in operation for things such as email and file transfer. The server I suggest you use is the latest version of Apache, which is the standard and it's free! If you are a Windows user then go to the downloads page and get the .msi file for your system. Double click on it and follow the install procedure. You will be prompted for a Network Domain, Server Name and Adminstrator Email. I suggest that if your computer is the only one on the network then use localhost for the first two options. Otherwise, put the name of your computer on the network. It doesn't really matter what you put for these and they can be changed later anyway. If you are running Linux then type

apt-get install apache2

in the terminal. This will pull down the program from the Universe repository and set it up on your system. Now to check it works. Open up your favourites browser and type in

http://servername

into the address bar, where servername is the name you chose for your server. You should see a page saying 'it works!'. If you do then well done. You're good to go. The usual set up at his point would be that you are connected to the Internet through a router. The router will have a firewall that will prevent requests from the Internet to your Web Server. There's no point in exposing yourself to hackers at this point, so we'll leave it like this for now. However, your local area network should be able to, which is good for testing any distributed system you may develop. Now for the next step, installing your mysql server.