Need a little help with setting up a Web Server...

Hi everyone!

In a couple of months from now, I hope to be setting up a web server/site for the company I work for. On the hardware side, it will just be a single standalone PC connected on a 256kb/s line to my ISP. The software will be NT Server v4 and IIS v4. The server will be running a web server, an ftp server(s) and a smtp server (the later being the one that comes with the NT Server Option Pack) - okay, I'm tempted by Linux but I don't think I'd feel as confident with the setup as I do with NT. As the smpt server doesn't provide any POP3 capabilities, remote users with e-mail accounts will be able to view their email via their web browser.

There a couple of areas that I'm unsure about and any help would be very welcome!

a) should I be asking my ISP for a single IP address for the site, or do I need a range of addresses? ...if all the servers (www, email, ftp) are situated on the single PC, does that mean that they will all map back to a single IP address?

b) my ISP offers Primary DNS hosting - how easy would it be for me to run my own DNS server? ...do I even *need* to run my own DNS server if everything is being handled on the single PC? ...how do I go about setting it up so that if the domain was abc.com, the e-mail will be [email protected], web site is www.abc.com, ftp is ftp.abc.com, mail server is smtp.abc.com - or are all these the defaults anyway?

c) the site will need to eventually handle credit card payments in some form or another - probably using micro-payments - does anyone recommend any of the third party solutions - cyberCash, BT Micro Array, etc?

...I guess that's all the questions that I can think of ;-)

If anyone can offer any advice, then I'd be forever in their debt!

Cheers!

Davey P
[email protected]

hey Dave this may not help at the moment but I was planning on looking into this as well... Perhaps this week so any thing I find out I'll let ya know...

On a side note have you thought of givig Linux just a small test run.... And see how it works. Just toss in a small HD to test it out...

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Compguy Pete
www.compguystechweb.com

Yeah - I'm a big fan of Linux, but at the end of the day you need to be a Linux Guru to make it run properly ;-) !!! I've worked with NT for a few years now, so I'll comfortable running a web server under it - there just a few areas that I'm not so sure about...

...the good news is that I've finally managed to get MS DNS Server up and running correctly today - I can see why people can write whole books about setting up a DNS server now! So, I've kinda answered my first two questions now - but all advice is still good advice in my opinion.

Davey P

Dave ... Hi ... I am setting up Exchange server on my NT server... Please tell me in detail how you did the DNS setup and also outline your DNS entries in the Network Panel in Control Panel...

Thanks ... I desperately need this ... I can't get mails sent to me from anybody -