So, a couple of moments ago I did not have a website and now I do. This blog is hosted on one of my personal servers. Cost of my new website, zero dollars. In the old days, when I first started using the Internet, it was very expensive to host your own website. Now, with the help of free and open source programs, I am able to create a personal web-page at no extra cost.
I have a couple of servers at home, leftovers from my research days, that I had previously used as file and media servers for my LAN. The move to hosting a website appeared natural to me. However, there were a number of things that I needed to handle before being able to do so.
First, my main concern was that I would have to shell out some hard earned dollars to buy a domain name and a fixed IP. Recently, I watched a video of a hacker at Defcon who had his Mac stolen and the journey that he went through to get back his machine.
One of the tools he mentioned was dyndns. I immediately became interested. Here was a piece of software that would allow me to have a domain name without getting a fixed IP or shelling out for an expensive domain name. So I created an account on dyndns.com, and downloaded ddclient for my Ubuntu server.
That solved the problem of getting a domain name. Next I downloaded and installed apache server. From there, it was pretty easy to set up a simple test website — no more than a couple of minutes in fact.
However, since I am not a great artist, I decided to get a more sophisticated system on-line. One of the main candidates that came to mind was WordPress. WordPress boasts a five minute install time, but I have to admit it took me a bit more than that.
First, I downloaded MySQL and set up a database for my website. Next, I went through the process of setting up the WordPress software. I was doing this from my laptop using ssh to access my remote server which is in my other apartment. The WordPress installation process contains an automated browser-based configuration process that links everything together.
In my case, it got stuck at the stage of providing the necessary MySQL settings for the software. Since I was doing this remotely, I tried entering the IP address of my server through the browser. After several attempts resulted in error messages telling me that my database server was not accessible, I made manual changes to the configuration files. That fixed the problem immediately.
And so, this blog is now hosted on my personal server. I have the pleasure of knowing that I am controlling my own content. The real beauty of the entire thing, is that all the components used to do this are FOSS. So not only do I have control over my content, I also have control over the platform that hosts it. The knowledge that I can add any feature to my OS and web server at any time by looking at their source code and modifying it is exhilarating.
This is Great Congratulations.
It Would be nice if you try making a tutorial about this experience for others to benefit from it.
Post your new updates on Facebook so that I can follow it.
Thanks. Will do. I will write a step by step tutorial and post on facebook. Thanks for the feedback.
Testing
bookmarked!!, I love your site!