Dear all,

Hi, I am interested in obtaining all information about setting up a web server for hosting purpose.

I don't have any knowledge on web hosting and web server configuration.

What should I do for the very first step?

Can you please suggest a link which will decribe from the very basic to advance web server setting, dns setting, ftp setting and mail server setting? I would like to use qmail as my mail server.

for DNS i recommend the book DNS and BIND, the O'Reilly book. I have it, it's great.

for webserver setup- apache normally comes setup with most main-stream distros if u select to have it installed for you. the webhosting part would involve some extra setup. look for something on Virtual Hosts (in apache).
go to http://www.google.com/linux and type in "apache virtual host howto" and see what u come up with.

i have never setup FTP, i just use my webserver to serv files, i dont do a large number of files, usually just documents, stuff that could be emailed if need be.

never used qmail, but Sendmail was easy for me to setup (well, easy after i found what the problem was).


and a good tool to help manage everything is webmin.
http://webmin.com