Have you ever wanted to set your own bandwidth/disk space limiters with just the right price on a web hosting plan? Well, technically, now you can... but it's entirely up to you to maintain it. In this short and easy tutorial, we are going set up a local web server which only we can access (for now). There are only three steps and this should only take us about 5 minutes!

You will need to download: PHP 5.0.0 zip package (7mb) and apache_2.0.50-win32-x86-no_ssl.msi (6mb)

This is our goal... to create a functional web server:

[ an example of what you will see when apache is installed correctly ]

Step 1 - Arranging everything in a neat and orderly fashion
Following this tutorial will assure you a working web server for Windows! (Tested on WinXP)

Let us make a root directory which we can house all our web apps so they can be readily accessed with style. Make a folder in your local drive called 'Web'. I used the C drive as my example.

 
[ a shortened version of my C drive ]

Heh.. well done on completing step one. We have just set the locale of the base which we will be working off of. With the first step done in such an easy manner, the next two will be a breeze.

Continue to step two - installing Apache 2.0.50