Mac OS X Lion Server For Dummies®

Prerequisites

Before hosting a website, you need to do a few things:

• If you want your website to be visible on the Internet, you need to own your domain name and register it with a domain name service, such as Network Solutions. (You can find a complete list of domain name registration services at http://internic.net.)

  If you just want your users to access your site from the Internet, but don't need others to see it, you don't have to have a registered domain name. Instead, you can have a private domain name (in the form server.example.private) along with virtual private networking (VPN) configured. Your users then access your site through a secure (private) connection.

• Have domain name service (DNS) configured so that your domain name resolves (or points to) the IP address of the web server. This could be on a DNS server on your network or on the Mac server itself, if it's acting as the network's DNS server.

  If DNS isn't set up, users have to enter the IP address of the server in their web browsers. (You can find some information on DNS throughout this chapter and in Chapter 3.)

• If you're serving content to the Internet, check your firewall. The automatically created website uses port 80 or port 443 if you're using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) security. You can also change the defaults.

This chapter assumes that you've taken care of these things.