Forum Moderators: phranque
Welcome to WebmasterWorld...
Based on your questions, you appear to be new to this space. Glad to see you're interested in learning Apache, but this is a big undertaking.
An important question to ask is how you intend to connect your website to the Internet. If you are planning on using your home computer as the host, you need to make sure that your ISP allows you to host without purchasing some kind of business service.
Many ISPs frown upon or even attempt to block users from hosting websites from "residential" service.
You can find decent hosting solutions that start as low as $3 - $4 a month and upwards from there. If you're interested in learning Apache from the ground up, that's fine. But if you're interested in getting your website up and running, you might want to have someone else host your website until you're up to speed on Apache and all the other tools that go along with hosting from home.
The old one (With Apache) is running ME
One important note: Apache does not sit well with Windows ME - it will probably run, but it will be flaky and the underlying OS is not robust or secure enough to act as a public web server.
If your ISP allows you to use the server on your connection, then you should consider either running Apache on a machine running a later version of Windows (2000, XP or Windows Server 2003) or convert your current server to run Apache under Linux or FreeBSD (which is another learning curve too!)
Even if your ISP does not allow you to run a server and you decide to go down the usual shared hosting route, keeping and running a test server is ideal for getting to know Apache and to test your sites and scripts without having to upload to a live server.
This was something I had in my response and must have edited it out. I agree. Having Apache on a box you can use as a test server is ideal. It's a great way to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes without taking your website offline.
One last thing. If for some reason you decide to run from home, make sure you're up on security. If this machine has personal / sensitive information on it OR it is networked to other PCs in your home, you need to be up on security too.
