If I was talking to my mom sure. But were talking on HN here, clicking around your routers web UI shouldn't be too difficult for anyone here to figure out. And honestly if you can't figure that out you shouldn't be exposing your stuff to the internet anyway, you will become a part of a botnet in short order.
Setting up Apache properly is a much bigger PITA for anything other than a static html use IMHO.
I wanna thank you for the time you took to lay it out. And, I'm gonna need to look up everything you mentioned, cuz it's more like a 301 for me not 101. I don't even know what a port 80 is!
In the 90s I taught myself html to build out stuff, but never had to host anything.
Apache? I've heard it a thousand times. Couldn't tell you what it was.
So, yeah. Assume I'm yr mom.
This is also a good example of why web2 came to be. Cuz people like me have zero idea what's being talked about.
Let me just warn you- running a webserver requires technical skill- you will be providing an open door into your computer and network if you go down this path. But its not so hard if you google each of those sections, at least to get something basic going.
I don't think anyone was lamenting that its not super duper easy to create a freestanding website these days, just that its becoming increasingly difficult to without requiring centralized services- most notably ssl.
web2 also generally refers to web2.0 where we moved from static webpages and webpages that could only really change in significant ways if you hit refresh, to dynamically updated webpages, initially using AJAX, but there are now a myriad of ways to do so- but this allowed clunky web pages to have capabilities that are more or less at parity with desktop applications. Then again with all this web3 talk, what "web2" refers to may get distorted over time.
But yeah- running your own web infrastructure is work and hence why wordpress and other blog service providers, as well as even things like Geocities were/are so popular. While it is a lot more common these days, but even having a computer that was on 24/7/365 was not common and this was reason enough to use a hosted solution. Most of my friends have some sort of media server setup that is on 24/7 these days, but we are admittedly likely still outliers on this, compared to entirely non-technical people.
Setting up Apache properly is a much bigger PITA for anything other than a static html use IMHO.