Creating Self-Hosted Sites
All of the tasks in the preceding sections also apply to sites you create on your own server. The major differences between hosted and self-hosted sites are that:
You usually access self-hosted sites over an intranet rather than the Internet, so those sites are automatically trusted, and you have fewer client security issues to worry about.
Since self-hosted sites are usually part of your network, you can quickly grant all network users access to the site (see the section "Adding Members Quickly" later in this chapter).
You must install and maintain SharePoint yourself, which requires more knowledge about tools like IIS, SQL, and Windows security than you need when using hosted sites.
You have direct access to the server, so you have both more control and more responsibility (for backups, etc.) than in a hosted environment.
The rest of this chapter explores installing SharePoint and creating SharePoint sites on your own server. If you've already decided to stick with a hosted site, you can skip ahead to the section "Allowing Anonymous Access," because the next sections don't really apply to you.