Webpage Technical Info

• First of all, this web page is running on a refurbished corporate desktop computer. It cost me $150.00 plus another $50.00 for more memory. It is a Dell Optiplex GX-1, with a screaming-fast Pentium-II 350 MHz processor. This is a step up from my previous server, a cast-off Dell home computer with a 200 MHz processor and 60 MB RAM. As you can see, you do not need to spend much money to host a site!


• The server is running the FreeBSD operating system. The software cost me a few dollars for the CD-R disks and some bandwidth to download the software images. And no, I did not break any laws by doing this.


• The web server software itself is Apache. This is high-quality software, and free of charge. Most of the world's websites are powered by Apache.


• The web server also utilizes the PHP scripting language. This is a cross-platform, HTML-embedded, server-side web scripting language. It lets you generate web pages with dynamic information, and also handles back-end database connectivity for complex sites. The time zone clocks and hit-counter on the main page are generated by PHP.
  
  PHP is in use on over 1.2 million Internet-reachable server IP addresses, and over 10 million domains.



• The server also functions as a Domain Naming System (DNS) server for the vanemery.com domain. For this role, it uses software called BIND.



• The server also functions as a mail server.



• The server is also synced to an atomic clock time server elsewhere on the Internet. That means that the time on my system is very accurate!



• The server does other things as well, but I have only listed the main functions.