Just Uber

What follows in an light introduction aimed at new users wanting to run their own home servers. Please feel free to contribute.

To host or not to host, that is the question!

Whether or not to host your web site from a home Linux server depends on why you actually want to do this.

If you want to host from home to save money, or because you think it’d be easier than hosting elsewhere then it’s probably not the way to go. If you’re going down this route because you’d like to learn more about Linux and/or hosting then I’d wholeheartedly recommend it!

VMWare - Server Virtualisation

If you are not familiar with Linux, then you might want to give VMWare (free from www.vmware.com) a try. VMWare emulates another computer sitting on top of your Windows operating system. You could install Linux on this virtual computer without having to reformat your machine. Run a search on “server virtualisation” (or “server virtualization” if you prefer the American spelling) on your favourite search engine to find out more.

VMWare has some pre-built Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP web servers available for download which you can run using VMWare Player (free) or VMWare Server (also free). There’s one called Grandmas LAMP which is designed for beginners, and runs Ubuntu (an easy to use Linux OS). You can get it from the VMWare appliances directory

Setting up your Linux server

After downloading and installing VMWare Server onto your Windows computer you’ll need to get your Linux server. Visit the link above and grab a copy of Grandmas LAMP. Unzip it and open the .vmx file using VMWare Server. Grandmas LAMP includes a graphical desktop so it should be easy to use. To help you out even more, a web page opens in your screen when you start running it which describes in plain english how to use it. You can find more on Grandmas LAMP here too.

After following the Grandmas LAMP instructions, visiting the Ubuntu forums and searching the web, you should have your LAMP server up and running. Well done! Now you’ll want people to be able to connect…

Making your server visible to the net

Presuming that your VMWare machine has a NATed IP address on your Windows PC (the VMWare server setup will show a NAT network interface), then you should be able to get connections to your virtual Linux machine from the wide world. If you have a static IP address then you’re in luck. This makes your job much easier and you can ignore the next bit on dynamic IP address dns resolution. If not - Sorry

So you have a dynamic IP address. This means that everytime you reconnect to your ISP you get a different IP. This is going to make you pretty hard to find on the internet so we’re going to have to resolve the problem. Go on over to dyndns This company offers a service which will allow your Windows machine (the one your VMWare Linux server is running on) to update it’s IP address to a hostname on the internet whenever it changes. You need to sign up for one of their domain names (free) and install one of the update clients to your machine.

Fruits of your labour!

Finally the moment of truth. From another machine try to access your shiny new web server by using either your static IP address (if you have one) or your dydns.com domain name. If everything has gone well you should see your web page. If not then you are going to have to do a little more research!

Above all this should be fun and you will get more from running your own web server than you ever could using a hosted one!

I originally wrote this for helium.com - but it fits quite well here too..

Do you know what to look for when considering web hosting? There are many options and it’s important to learn about each one. While Linux web hosting is a good option there are others that might suit your needs better. Check out what colocation hosting is and how it might work for your web hosting needs. When it comes to your website you want the best, so learn about your web host options before diving into something.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 at 10:35 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.