Right now I’m using Weather Display to FTP the data to my internet provider every 1/2 hour via DSL. I’m considering rather than FTP’ing every 1/2 hour to create a server on the XP box that I’m using. I’m figuring that by doing this, I gain in 2 aspects: 1) eliminate drag on system by FTP 2) Don’t need to be concerned about file sizes on provider. I’m also thinking that this would provide more recent data. Any thoughts or recommendations would be appreciated
i guess the most basic question, does your ISP allow port 80 connections? Many block them, for the very reason so people can’t run there own webservers
Do you really think that running IIS (I assume) 24 by 7 on your XP box will use less resources than a quickie ftp every 30 mins? Where do you want to view the data from, and how often will it be viewed? Remember that the access speed to a website on your machine from the outside world is your upload speed, which is usually slower than your download speed. Also be sure you understand the security implications of opening your firewall to this server. As you might guess by now there’s no way in heck that I would want to do this, but there are folks on here who do so hopefully one of them will respond too.
If the transfer of those files is a drag on your current connection and server, then setting up a webserver on your box will be a lot worse since it will be serving the same files you are only sending once to potentially many.
Assume that only 5 people are looking at your mail stuff on a regular basis.
You are sending up the graphic images and other data to your current web server once. The 5 visitors are getting their copes from there, not your home machine.
If you make you home box the server, now those 5 guys each getting the files from your home box. Traffic goes up x 4.
Others above have provided other reasons (firewall issues), whether or not you can even sever port 80 from home etc…
Wow, I guess that about answers that! Thank you all for your responses
joe
however, it can be more fun 
OK maybe that’s it then? Wouldn’t this allow for a “more up to the minute” report? Would this be correct? Right now I have Weather Display running from the C: drive and I have all the files created in a wdisplay directory and I have a web server folder (thru IIS) on (another physical HD named) E: drive called “weather” so can I just copy the existing folders & files in the “C:\wdisplay” directory into the “E:\weather” folder (to maintain prior history) and then just point all the updates into the “E:\weather” folder as well? What I was trying to achieve is to keep my C: drive closed off as a safety precaution. Would anyone have any suggestions as to another way to accomplish this. thank you
What I did here was point WD to the folder that IIS is set to use so that all the files are automatically created there by WD. Works quite well (as long as IIS continues to run anyway).
I serve my own pages and I too simply have WD create the files in my virtual directory that IIS serves and it works perfectly. It does put the job on you to keep your server up and running. If your service provider doesn’t allow serving on port 80 simply change it to a different port and get a domain name. This way yo can do stealth forwarding and the end use user doesn’t even know if they are on port 80 or not.