Home Web Server makes it possible to run websites on the local computer system. The web server supports a wide variety of options including php, cgi and isapi support next to SSL connections and private member directories. Not everything is preinstalled on the other hand. It is for example necessary to download PHP compiler from the official PHP website to add PHP support.

Basic HTML websites are on the other hand available by default. The root of the web server can be accessed locally by opening http://127.0.0.1/ in the web browser if the connection is established from the local computer. Users from the local network or remote networks need to use the local or Internet IP to connect to the web server.

Many aspects of the web server can be configured in the options including connection limits and timeouts, domain and root aliases, connection logging, supported mime types or redirects.

Home Web Server provides extensive options that should suite the needs of most users who want to install a web server on their computer. Alternatives are Quick PHP Web Server, XAMPP web server or the Portable Web Server.

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The requirements are that the webserver is up and running at your computer and that the Apache module is started. Download one of the many proxy scripts and unzip it. I suggest you create a new sub directory in htdocs, don’t name it proxy . use a name that does not tell anyone what the files in the directory could be for. This is to prevent keyword filters that could block your local url if they find the keyword proxy in it. Name it tennis for instance.

Move the files index.php, javascript.js, PHProxy.class.php, style.css and url_form.inc into the new directory. Et voila, you are done. Test the script by accessing it locally (http://localhost/tennis/) ; If the proxy script appears everything is fine and you can access it from anywhere on the net as long as your local computer is connected to the web and the apache module is started.

It is highly unlikely that this proxy is banned by the admins of your school, university or company because it runs on a dynamic IP and no one has ever used it before.

To secure the directory do the following: Create a .htaccess file – Windows Explorer does not like this kind of files but a good editor should be able to create the file without errors. Add the following lines to the file and save it.


Options All -Indexes
AuthName "Go Away ;)"
AuthType Basic

A better protection would be to use a password protection, this is done the following way:

Create an encrypted password and copy the result in a file named randomly starting with a . – for instance .grqwev ; Place the file into the directory that you want to protect. Add a .htaccess file to the directory with the following lines.

AuthUserFile /tennis/.grqwev
AuthType Basic
AuthName “Top Secret”
Require valid-user

That is it. You password protected your proxy script running on your local computer. Only users who know the password are able to login and use the proxy, everyone else will not be able to see what lies behind the password request.

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Download Xampp for Windows and install it on your system. It does not matter if you install the modules as services, you can activate them as well by opening the control panel. (start apache) Once installed the webserver should be accessible by typing in http://localhost or http://yourdynamicip; You can look up your dynamic ip using my ip lookup script. Hosting files is as easy, just upload all the files that you want to share into the subfolder htdocs or create a subfolder and add the files to it.

Access the subfolder by appending /subfolder/ to the url that you want to access. You can add html and php files as well and those can be accessed as well similar to those files on other websites. It is easy to secure folders or the complete server using so called .htaccess files. Use the htaccess generator and add the generated files to your directories that you want to protect.

There is one last thing that can be optimized. It is difficulty for others to access your webserver if you have dynamic IPs. To counter this you could use a free service like DynDNS which adds a static dns to your IP. Friends and everyone else who should access the webserver can then use the dynamic dns which looks something like subdomain.dyndns.bz instead of the dynamic IP address.

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