Hey,

Back when I was searching for a free webhost, I came across this one (name is obviously censored and replaced!) http://www.somewebhost.com But when I looked at their plans, they have 2 servers for hosting. One is paid and the free one. But they have it like, box6.somewebhost.com and box7.somewebhost.com, but these are two totally different servers!

I would like to know how you do this because when looking at Google IP addresses, the one that hosts Google.com is totally different than the one that hosts gmail.google.com.

Thanks!

I'm not sure exactly how it works, but I know that you can assign servers to pools that all respond to the same domain name depending on things like how busy any given server is and the like. It's really hardcore netwroking stuff, that in general, only huge sites need to worry about. It WOULD be pretty cool to rig up in one's basement tho.

See, I would like to launch my own server and using a subdomain to link it to my website that I have already put over $100 into (that's why I am here, free hosting! lol) or something like it..... But yeah, it would be cool... hmmm... any good IT techs getting free hosting here? lol

well box6.somewebhost.com and box7.somewebhost.com is the DNS for the Domain name you usually have two of them cause there are two servers one the main server and one the backup, two change the DNS for your domain name just go to the plave were you purchased the domain name and ask them to change the DNS for that domain name.

Hi,

As clovis said, it's just a dsn stuff. When you buy a domain, you really by the
<.somewebhost.com>. Then you add some hosts (aliases) to the servers (or services) existing in your domain.

"www" means that it's a http server
"ftp" means that it's a ftp server .....

most of times, you have a local rea network and only one computer connected to internet (for security). On this computer you can have a firewall .... and a DNS Server.


the main server, which has a "route-able" ip address (visible over internet) will redirect browsers to comp1 if www.somewebhost.com is hit, to COMP2 if ftp.somewebhost.com... it's just dsn redirecting. The client will only see one ip address, 62.X.X.X

It's not like some domain say www.google.com or www.microsoft.com points to a single server. No, there a lots of them.

There are various ways of distributing the traffic between the servers. It is actually very interesting topic. There's no perfect algorithm for this task and which one is the best depends greatly on the type of traffic. Anyways I'm not going to go off-topic here, but if someone's interested about these algorithms start a thread and I'll give you a longish reply.

How long of a reply are we talking? Anyway, I don't think that you would be going off topic about server linking....

So clovis, I got my domain from Godaddy.com (not the one that is hosted here, I pay for one site and have to look for free web hosting for any new site). My paid server is at my web host and I am running a server at home. I would like to use a subdomain to link my home server with my paid server just as in, subdomain.mydomain.com. How would I do this DNS configurations?

carpedemus, I am trying to understand your diagram. You have it as my main server which is visble, and then there is a separate WWW server that hosts documents and files, then a FTP server, and then a mail server. Could you explain how these 3 servers are linked to the main server and how the main server actually "works" as in taking WWW requests and pulling up pages from the WWW server and so on. Or is the main server just a DNS server "routing" requests to the proper servers?

But here is how I saw a server setup:
MAIN SERVER --> WWW Server, Mail Server, FTP Server
Everything would be on one server... I also don't really know of the book topic I should look at. It's not like there is a book called "Your Own Web Hosting at Home for Dummies".

So instead of making a $500 investment for one server, I would have to times that by 4?! Oh man! Looks like this summer I am going to have to find a job! It's not like I make $2000 on my Google Ads or have $2000 laying around! Or, could I just skip some of it for now and just add a server? Like, one server and load some sort of Linux distro I take it (I was going to use Windows 2K as I found a guide some guy wrote and he uses Windows 2K).

Thanks for any feedback you can give me...