OK, so as part of my self tuition in setting up a home server, I decided that I would direct a little used domain that I own, Morrowtech.co.uk to my home server. To do this, I went to my registrar’s control panel (UKReg / Fasthosts in my case) and selected Advanced DNS.
What is advanced DNS? According to Fasthosts, “advanced DNS settings enable you to use different providers for website and email hosting, whilst still using Fasthosts nameservers.”
So, I simply placed my own IP address in the Website DNS (A record) field, and put my paid hosts (Jumpline.com) IP in the Email DNS (MX record). The usual message was displayed, i.e. that changes can take up to 72 hours to take effect. So I was not expecting anything this evening, but I decided that I would open Morrowtech in a browser tab before closing Firefox for the night, so tomorrow there would be no risk of forgetting to look. Anyway, guess what? Morrowtech is there already, and hosted on my very own computer!
Next step – set up the virtual servers!
One thing that I have done, which I suggest anyone else do in this situation, is to change the robots.txt on my server to disallow search engines, that way I will not risk duplicate content issues. The reason why my Tranquillizer site is displayed instead of a Morrowtech site, is because I am planning to upgrade the template, and want to do that on my home server first to check everything looks good. But until I get my vitual host set up, Tranquillizer will be displayed. One step at a time.
EDIT – it has reverted back to the original Morrowtech site… maybe it does take up to 72 hours!
