The best-known provider of free Web pages in the genealogy community is RootsWeb. However, while this division of Ancestry.com provides excellent free genealogy pages to users, they may not be interested in hosting pictures of your grandchildren or Excel spreadsheets of your bowling league’s results. For non-genealogy uses, you need to find another provider. General-purpose free Web hosting services include Angelfire (part of Lycos), GeoCities (part of Yahoo), TopCity.com, Tripod.com (also a part of Lycos), and a bunch of others.

RootsWeb inserts a few banner ads on the top of the Web pages you create, not a bad penalty for their great service. If you are looking for a free hosting service for genealogy data, I would strongly suggest you investigate RootsWeb. However, if you are looking for free hosting for topics other than genealogy, you will have to contend with the strong advertising used by most other free Web site providers. The other providers mentioned are usually more aggressive in their advertising; they insert pop-up ads and other gimmicks that may not be acceptable to you. These ads are not under your control; the provider of the free Web pages pays the bills by selling advertising on your Web pages.

Another major drawback to using one of the free Web pages providers is that you may be assigned a very long Internet address (URL). People may not be able to remember your URL if it is thirty or more letters long.

Still another drawback is the space available. The companies that provide Free Web pages are not interested in having you fill up megabytes of their disk drives. Most have a limit of how many megabytes you can store for free.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could simply host your Web pages on your own PC and allow others to gain access? In that way you could control all the contents. The only advertising on your pages would be the ads you place there, if any. The storage space available would be limited only by your own computer. You could have 60 gigabytes of storage space or even more, if you wish. Wouldn’t it be even better if you had a short URL, which others could remember?

For most people, hosting your own Web pages is easier than they think. If you are using an "always on" Internet connection, such as a cable modem or DSL, you probably can do that right now. You can host your Web pages at home via your cable modem or DSL connection, although many cable companies and DSL providers discourage this. I would suggest that you check the legal language of your agreement with your cable or DSL provider to see what they allow. What may be technically possible is not always allowed by contract.

If you use a dial-up connection to the Internet, you theoretically can host your own Web pages; however, you must realize that, when you disconnect your modem, the Web pages will also disappear. While dial-up Web servers are possible, they may not be practical. I will focus only on using DSL or cable modems. I will also assume that you leave your PC on and connected to the DSL or cable modem twenty-four hours a day, as I do.

Note: a minority of cable and DSL Internet providers use firewalls. If you are behind a firewall, hosting your own Web server will be much more difficult. To determine if you are behind a firewall, first find your IP address (a set of four numbers separated by periods that are your Internet address) and run a traceroute command from a remote computer to see if it can connect to your computer. This is easier than it sounds.

If you are running Windows 95, 98 or ME, click on START, then on RUN, and then type: WINIPCFG. This will launch the Windows IP configuration program. Select your network card from the pulldown menus. (Do not select the dial-up connection, which is the default.) There you will see a lot of information about your network connection, including your IP address. For instance, your IP address might be: 25.168.132.22.

If you are running Windows NT or Windows 2000, click on START, then on RUN, and then type CMD. This will open what is called a DOS Window. Then type: IPCONFIG. You will see several lines of information, including your IP address. Again, it might be 25.168.132.22.

You now can see if your PC is reachable from other locations by having some other computer do a TRACEROUTE command to your system. This is easy to do by going to www.traceroute.org. There you will see a list of other computers around the world that you can use to test your availability. Click on any country listed, then on any system available within that country. You will see a menu with a place to enter your IP address. Type in your IP address that you determined earlier, such as: 25.168.132.22. The remote system in another country will now attempt to "ping" your computer to see if it is accessible. You will then see a long list of computers and network routers listed, each with its own IP address. This listing shows the route around the world that the remote system uses to access your PC. If successful, the very last system listed will be yours. Check the IP address to make sure. You should not see any error messages. If the last IP address is not the one assigned to your system, you probably are behind a firewall. If so, the remainder of this article will not be applicable to you.

Assuming that your PC can be reached by other computers on the Internet, you now need to install a Web server. There are many Web servers available, and a number of them are free. Microsoft's free Personal Web Server (PWS) is a scaled-down version of Microsoft's full-featured Internet Information Server (IIS) and is included in the Windows 98 and FrontPage CDs. If you run Windows 98, you already have it. If you run Windows NT, 2000 or 95, you can download Personal Web Server free of charge from Microsoft’s Web site. However, keep in mind that it is designed for use on Intranets, not the Internet. While Personal Web Server will work for you as an Internet server, it does not have all the security features that you probably want. You might want to use a different free program, one that is designed for use on the Internet.

If you search any of the popular software download sites for "free Web server," you will find quite a few listed. They vary in features and ease of installation, however. I recently installed BadBlue Personal Edition, a free Web server and file-sharing server produced by Working Resources Inc. I can tell you that BadBlue Personal Edition is designed for use on the Web and that it is extremely easy to install. In fact, I had my Web server up and running within five minutes after downloading the free program.

BadBlue creates a main home page at C:\Program Files\BadBlue\PE\index.htm. The "PE" stands for "Personal Edition." You then can use the index.htm file as your main page with links to other files on your system in locations you specify. I placed my other pages in C:\WEB, although this is invisible to anyone accessing my Web server. They simply see my additional pages as extensions to the basic URL.

You can create your Web pages with any HTML editor. I used Microsoft FrontPage, but there are dozens of others to choose from, and some of them are also free. Any standard HTML editor will work well with BadBlue, as will the HTML output from most modern genealogy programs except for Family Tree Maker. Once the pages are created and BadBlue is installed, configured and launched, your Web pages are available to everyone on the World Wide Web. It really is easier than it sounds.

BadBlue Personal Edition allows you to share files as well as serve pages. You can also restrict access to your Web pages by IP address or by user accounts. To learn more about BadBlue Personal Edition or to download the program, go to: www.badblue.com.

So what address do people use to find your Web server? Here is where it gets complicated. Remember the exercise earlier, where you found your IP address? Do that again and tell others what your IP address is. In the previous example, we used a typical IP address of 25.168.132.22. Others can find your Web server by entering a URL of http://25.168.132.22 into their Web browsers. That’s right, just the numbers. No "www" or anything else, only the numeric IP address. That alone will tell the user’s Web browser to connect to the Web server program that is running on your PC.

Your IP address is not under your control; your Internet provider assigns it. Keep in mind that your IP address may change often. Many Internet providers will change your IP address for you automatically every day or every week. Others may leave it alone. Also, every time you re-boot your system you may be given a new IP address. Most Internet providers use dynamic IP addresses that can change on every re-boot.

You may have to tell your users about your new IP address every time it changes, not a convenient solution. Also, you may prefer to use a URL with a name, not a bunch of numbers. For instance,www.myplace.com would be easier to remember than http://25.168.132.22. In a future newsletter I will tell you how to use a free third-party service to assign a permanent name in place of your numeric URL. This name will continue to work, even if you re-boot or if your Internet provider changes your IP address. Your users only need to remember the name, not a long series of numbers.

In the meantime, if you would like to see pictures of my vacation last fall in Tahiti, look at the Web pages hosted on a tiny PC in my home. This Windows 2000 system runs BadBlue Personal Edition on a "book PC" that is about 8 ½ inches by 11 inches by 1 ½ inches; the size of a three-ring notebook. The same PC also runs the mailing list server for this newsletter and a number of other programs. You can connect to my PC at: www.roots.d2g.com.

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