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If you are planning to develop a web site, with transactional support under a Microsoft Platform, here it is a few points you must focus in..

  • Target or audience (how many concurrent users will connect to your server). Less or more than 10. This will tell you which Operating System version you must install.

  • Static or dynamic content.

  • Data Access (If it is required or not)

  • User friendly internet address (IP or domain name)

  • Content weight (heavy downloads or just html content)

  • Security: You will enable private zones (user & pass required)

  • Vulnerabilities: Check the Server weakness with the oficial software manufacturer documentation.

With this topics in mind you will ask the question: Is really the most convinient, install a web server at home?

If your answer is yes, it is because you have resolved a good percentage of this points.

Tools:

  • Broadband internet access: Ask to your ISP for the downstream and upstream speeds. Your clients will get data connections at your upstream speed.

  • Server/s: MS Windows 2K Server or Win2K Pro with IIS in both cases. Hardware requirement considerations taking in mind your application workload.

  • Knowledge of HTML, Java as well as Microsoft ASP programing languages.

  • Knowlegde about Networking if you need to mount a LAN to support a backend server. (Database dedicated server). If the application does not require a huge processing workload, both.. web server anda database server could reside on the same server. This is not a very good practice, but it could cover your initial concept test.

  • Domain name: If your ISP does not provide you an static public IP address, this mean you have a dynamic public IP... you could use some dynamic DNS service like www.no-ip.com or DNS2Go. So you can have Online visibility with a public domain name, not the yours one, but a public domain at least.

  • If your web site content is heavy, and you expect to have a lot of concurrent users connected, the web server at home it is not a good choice.

  • You must enable secure access to some parts of your web site, aplying security policies at Folder and file level, this is possible with IIS 5.0 integrated to a Win2K domain - e.g: Digest Authentication - (big work). Or managing your own security access philosophy based in your database, including a the header of all your "secured" files a call to a session check for authentication. Programming stuff...

  • Aply the security patchs that every Operating System has, included Linux, if you choose this one.

More tools:

  • Graphic designer tool, like fireworks from Macromedia.

  • Frontpage or Visual Interdev (VB if you need to write some encapsulated components).

  • MS Access or SQL Server. Knowlegde of ODBC access. There is a lot of information about this, a good start point could be: http://www.w3schools.com

  • Google ;-)). To search source code you can reuse.

  • VMWare (http://www.vmware.com) to experiment mounting a virtual lab at home.

  • Selfpaced training... of course.

That is...  for a very big picture about what you need to implement a web site, at home or not, in this case using MS Tools.