Subdomains

You may be surprised how easy it is to host a website from your own home. Typically, the only hurdle is your ISP, who makes a habit of blocking HTTP ports 80 and 443, but you can host HTTP on any port you want! Just install a webserver, pick a random port, ensure it is properly forwarded on your router and boom, website.

My early sites used free public subdomains though a provider called freedns.afraid.org. There you can get a free subdomain which someone else owns and has made available to the public. My first domain was kirkserver.edu.ms. EDU.MS has since vanished, as is the nature of these often-ephemeral domains.

Though your URL would look like http://myawesomesubdomain.reallyweird.rnd:1337
The number after the ":" is the port. This type of URL will find it difficult to be registered by a search engine and would be mostly obscured from the web.

Webservers

Most of the top ticket webserver software is open-source and free, like Apache and will run on any operating system. Though, the OS of choice is usually a Linux based one; apart from select enterprise distributions, these are open-source and free to install on a wide variety of hardware. A Linux server is typically easier to secure than a Windows one. Furthermore, there are prepackaged installers like XAMPP, which can get you up and running in minutes.

Administering a webserver securely is tricky and requires constant vigilance. To this effect I do not recommend it to everyone, as you will be opening your house to hackers if you homebrew with poor security practice (though you can always run locally, apart from the WWW).

My first webserver was an Intel Pentium II with a 250Mhz processor and 384Mb of RAM. You may think a computer worthless? Try running Linux on it. Linux comes in many varieties, text-based (no GUI) ones are perfect for a webserver and will cut back significantly on the resource requirements. But you have to learn how to use a terminal (command line). I would say the same, even if you do install a GUI.

A lot can be written on Linux and the various webhosting applications which ultimately comprise the internet. Fortunately, there are many freely available resources and active communities out there to provide support. I've always been a fan of Debian based distributions, Ubuntu in particular for its easier-than-most mentality.

A monumental game was released in 2006, it was the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Truly it was all the rage, perhaps paled only by its sequel. One of the most enduring features of the game was the ease of creating user content, or mods. The developers gave the players the tools needed to make your own mods, and the faithful internet community did the rest.

A college friend and I thought it would be cool to make some Oblivion mods, and maybe put them online. Opportunity had struck, I found another outlet for my website. Immediately I created Chpwner's Oblivion Mod Source, even before I had a mod to put there! For me it was more fun coding a website than it was modding a game. Maybe because making a really good mod is just so much harder to do.

In the end I made neither a good mod nor a good website. My friend ghosted me. Life goes on. As you can see, I became a shameless cross promoter of myself, advertising my bookstore on my mod website which will take us into the next chapter.

A side note: I made a sequel mod for Skyrim (circa 2012) featuring all the Dwarves from the Hobbit. I didn't publish it partly because it was an extension of an existing mod, and partly because I included actual music from the Hobbit movie which had just been released (we have a lame thing called copyright in the USA). My brother maintains that I did in fact accurately capture in the dwarven NPCs, the appearance of their counterpart in the Hobbit movie.