There are times when you either don’t have a web host or you don’t want to mess up your live site but you need to play around with your website. We show you how to turn your PC into a fully functional web and database server – all in less than 5 minutes!

Any web server which is going to host dynamic, database driven websites needs three things – the web server itself, a scripting language and a database server.

For our web server we’re going to be using Apache – the web server that powers a huge percentage of the web.

Secondly for our scripting language we’re going to use PHP which drives millions of websites.

Lastly for our database server we’re going to be using the widely used MySQL database server.

Now installing and configuring Apache, MySQL and PHP doesn’t sound like fun but the great thing is we can download them all as one easy to install package and because we’re going to use Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP the package has been named WAMP.

We first need to download WAMP from http://www.wampserver.com/en/index.php Once downloaded double-click the WAMP file to begin the installation.

Accept all the default installation options (choose whether to have WAMP start automatically with Windows or not and enter your email address when prompted) and then WAMP will launch leaving you with nothing more to see than the WAMP status icon in your system tray.

Now it’s not much to look at but you have just installed a webserver, scripting language, database server plus a PHP based database administration tool called phpMyAdmin which is some achievement even for an experienced Geek.

Left-click the WAMP status icon and put the server online and then click it again and select LOCALHOST and you’ll see the default web page showing you the thing is working. From here you can create as many websites as you like by creating subfolders in C:WAMPWWW and use phpMyAdmin to create databases so can install complex scripts such as the content management system Joomla or Ecommerce package OSCommerce – Anything is possible!

Now you could open up your PC to access from the Internet and become your own host but you can’t beat hosting your site with a proper hosting company for speed, reliability and security so I’d keep my WAMP server for testing and experimenting with developing your sites.