Host blog from a home PC with Linux

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Turd Furguson

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 22, 2004
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Does anyone have a decent guide in their bookmarks for installing Wordpress on a linux PC to host a blog with? I already have my blog built with 1&1 and would love to do a full backup, cancel my account, and host it all from my home connection.

This would be going on a Shuttle XPS 1.4ghz Duron with 1gig ram. So it has the horsepower. I only average 600 visitors a day so connections shouldn't be that big of an issue at this point. I have a 4Mbit uplink connection with my cable internet. (Yes I know it may violate ToS.)

But the question is, is it worth saving $60 bucks a year to do this.
 
$60 per year == $5 per month

I bet you'd spend $5 per month on the electric bill alone, not to mention any other consequential dollar and time costs related to proper hosting. So unless you got a wild hair to host it yourself, I say leave it to 1&1 or whatever host you choose.
 
So, just to make sure you know all that is involved beforehand.

First, do you have a static IP address at home? I'm just asking as 99% of home internet users do not. If you don't do you have the ability to change your DNS settings every time your IP address changes? We are talking every 8 hours usually.

Oh, also, who controls your domain name at the moment? 1&1? Well, you will probably need to buy that or get it transferred or whatever. That is a hassle in itself. Oh, and you will need to pay for or set up your own DNS server to control that domain.

Second, does your internet provider allow servers at all? Oddly enough AT&T and Charter both have provisions against this and if they decide to block you, don't come back whining. I have been running a low volume server for 8 years now and haven't been noticed. Usually, the provision is there to get the people really burning through bandwidth.

Alright, now that the major unpleasentness is over. It is a pretty simple process of installing some sort of webserver (Apache), some sort of database server(mySQL), and then Wordpress itself.

Oh, you will probably be needing to futz around in the Apache properties a ton as Wordpress has some stupid caching issues if you leave Apache default.

Also, do you current use 1&1's email service? I swear that keeping a freaking email server running is one of the most exasperating experiences of my life. Spending 2 days setting it up and having to update spamassasin constantly to fight all the spam only to have it shunt a ton of my good email into the well of souls pissed me off beyond anything. To make it worse, most Internet provides flat out block port 25 for mail servers. So, you will probably have to get someone else to handle your mail.

I will help you through it and point you at the cavelcade of steps, but I just want to make sure you know what you are getting into.
 
It's always great to run everything yourself at home if you have the bandwidth as you truely have unlimited space and horse power given you can just keep adding hardware as needed at very low cost. (hardware at home is WAY cheaper then online, as you only pay once for it vs monthly). The initial setup will be harder though but once it's all running and you have everything configured such as backups it can be rewarding.

Make sure your ISP allows it though. If you violate their ToS and they catch you, then your site is going down and you'll be in an emergency situation to try to find a place to host it, while your net is also down, so you'll be working from an internet cafe.

If you're doing this only to save $60 a year, then it's not worth the effort. Though every site owner should also have a local web server for develelopment. In this day in age there is no reason why a website should be "down for maintenance". Code everything locally, ensure it works, then upload in one shot for minimal downtime.

Not really a huge issue for a blog, but if you expand into something bigger then you're setup.
 
jgoewert said:
First, do you have a static IP address at home? I'm just asking as 99% of home internet users do not. If you don't do you have the ability to change your DNS settings every time your IP address changes? We are talking every 8 hours usually.
Click to expand...
ISP-provided DHCP IP addresses don't change anywhere near this often.
 
Apache, PHP, MySQL, Wordpress. In that order. Get the latest version of each for your OS. Been hosting a few websites at my house for a while now. I started it because I wanted to learn AND have total control.

It was a bitch at first because I didn't know a damn thing. Now I can install, configure and have a site up and running in an hour. If you don't have a static IP then get you a free DynDns or No-Ip account. Apache works with them beautifully. I know because I'm doing it as we speak.

I host about 3 websites so far (one Wordpress) with my one little old HP P4 2.8Ghz 1Gb system. Its been great to learn on but I'm about to buy an Apple Mini Server soon to replace it now that I know wtf I'm doing to justify spending the $$.

I'll try to help you if I can... but my server is a simple WindowsXP machine and not Linux.
 
PTNL said:
$60 per year == $5 per month

I bet you'd spend $5 per month on the electric bill alone, not to mention any other consequential dollar and time costs related to proper hosting. So unless you got a wild hair to host it yourself, I say leave it to 1&1 or whatever host you choose.
Click to expand...

This is all that really needs to be said. You also get a professional admin team handling system security & backups when you pay for hosting. Setting it up yourself would be a great learning experience but not for your 'real' site.
 
jgoewert said:
Can you let AT&T know that then? Mine was changing about that often on DSL.
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A DHCP lease that changes this frequently means trouble for the ISP because of the increased DHCP traffic and server load. It also means trouble for the customer because they're essentially losing their connection that frequently.

I'm sure it would be more efficient if you contacted AT+T yourself. I work a lot, so I'm pretty busy with more productive things. I also don't have any of your account information, so I wouldn't be able to give them a meaningful report. Further, since you say "was" and "about", I'm not sure the problem is still happening, how often it's happening, or if you were observing the correct change.
 
Glad to see EVERYONE is so helpful. You guys are awesome.....

To the OP. I dont have something to directly help you but anything I say is sure to be more helpful than whats already been said....

If you're not stuck on linux then I suggest Microsoft Web Platform Installer. It will download, install, and configure IIS, Mysql and Wordpress for you.

After that forward port 80

Get a dyndns.org hostname and get your website to bind to it in IIS.

done.
 
jadams said:
Glad to see EVERYONE is so helpful. You guys are awesome.....

To the OP. I dont have something to directly help you but anything I say is sure to be more helpful than whats already been said....
Click to expand...
LOL. You're on your high horse because you don't think we're helping a guy named "Turd", and completely ignore his question, yourself. His question wasn't about what he needed to do -- his question was about it being "worth it" or not. Though the quality of being "worth it" is very subjective, I think several posts in the thread answered the question a lot better than yours did.
 
Install centos

yum install httpd php php-mysql mysql


done, not sure what other php modules you may need but they are easy enough to install.

First, do you have a static IP address at home? I'm just asking as 99% of home internet users do not. If you don't do you have the ability to change your DNS settings every time your IP address changes? We are talking every 8 hours usually.

Oh, also, who controls your domain name at the moment? 1&1? Well, you will probably need to buy that or get it transferred or whatever. That is a hassle in itself. Oh, and you will need to pay for or set up your own DNS server to control that domain.
Click to expand...

not sure where you live but ISP dont change IP's every 8 hours, it usually gets changed if you power cycle your modem, but either way, you want a static IP.

Also, you don't need to run your own DNS server ? ? ?

Who ever he registered the domain with, does all that for you, they simply need to point their domain to the IP of the host, you dont "rent" your domain so to speak, well kind of, but he already "owns" the domain and all the tools needed to get it to point to a host.

jadams, what are you smoking? plenty of useful informaiton in here if you bothered to read and understand what the OP was asking which you clearly dont.

Another thing to think about, what if your power goes out, your little server dies? Are you ready to have down time?
 
+1 for CentOS. Eww @ windows. Actually I find Linux easier to setup for a web server TBH but guess I'm just more used to it.

Just be sure you have a good motive on why you want to do this. Saving money is not really one of them. Well, it is, but you have to ask yourself if it's worth your time. If you enjoy this stuff and want more control, then that's a plausible reason and I say go for it.

I personally would host all my stuff at home if I had the bandwidth. Everything is 10x easier when it's physically accessible, especially when something goes down.
 
mikeblas said:
LOL. You're on your high horse because you don't think we're helping a guy named "Turd", and completely ignore his question, yourself. His question wasn't about what he needed to do -- his question was about it being "worth it" or not. Though the quality of being "worth it" is very subjective, I think several posts in the thread answered the question a lot better than yours did.
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No high horse here my friend. I'm not trying to compensate for a multi year epeen hard membership. The guy asked for a guide to host his own wordpress. While I didn't offer a linux solution I offered one that virtually anyone with any technical knowledge can do. everyone made it out to be some sort of crazy endeavor WHEN IN REALITY he can have it up and running in an hour. It really is that simple.....

I'm not 'smoking' anything. You guys make things out to be 100000000x harder than they are.

/
 
I would install it onto ubuntu 10.04 LTS and use webmin to upload it to the webserver then go to the install link because that is what I did to my wordpress setup. Also you want to make sure you get a static ip address at home if you can get one. I have my own webserver on a 40gb IDE hard drive and my server been up for 4 years. Also on the electric bill my last month bill was only 100 dollars that is with 5 computers running, heating etc.
 
jadams said:
No high horse here my friend. I'm not trying to compensate for a multi year epeen hard membership. The guy asked for a guide to host his own wordpress. While I didn't offer a linux solution I offered one that virtually anyone with any technical knowledge can do. everyone made it out to be some sort of crazy endeavor WHEN IN REALITY he can have it up and running in an hour. It really is that simple.....

I'm not 'smoking' anything. You guys make things out to be 100000000x harder than they are.

/
Click to expand...

You've missed the other, and contextually more significant, question in the first post.
Turd Furguson said:
But the question is, is it worth saving $60 bucks a year to do this.
Click to expand...
 
mikeblas said:
ISP-provided DHCP IP addresses don't change anywhere near this often.
Click to expand...

Mine hasn't changed in years... when we swapped out modems for a new one it changed for a bit, then we swapped to another modem and it went back to the old IP.
 
It's a waste of time. 60 bucks is probably what, 1-3 hours worth of income? It will take more than that to setup and manage. Pay someone to do it, and go skiing or something instead.
 
Turd Furguson said:
But the question is, is it worth saving $60 bucks a year to do this.
Click to expand...

From a straight up cost/month standpoint, no. If you don't like tinkering with hardware, no. If you are expecting to host a high traffic site through your cable connection, NO!

But if your goal is to use it as a learning platform, or if you want full control over your server to choose whatever technology you see fit, then a huge YES.

Truth be told, if it's a small, personal site, most ISP probably won't care that much, even though it is technically a violation of their TOS. They have much bigger fish to fry with Bittorrent and NetFlix traffic.

As for dynamic IP issues. 1) it rarely changes that much, and 2) if you register with somewhere like dyndns.org, there are programs that you can install that will detect IP address changes and automatically update DNS for you, also, most decent routers have DDNS features built-in that can do the same thing as well.
 
From a standpoint of time and money i would have to agree, if you dont want to geek out with it then no its not worth it at all...

but if your like me and just want to do this because then you know you did it and you keep it running yourself then hell yes its well worth the trouble. I spent about 2 weeks in the evenings figuring out how to get wordpress running great on a rhel box. I spent alot of time with google and some terminal shells. I also setup my own mail server to go along with the blog domain. It was alot of fun and i would do it again no questions asked, but that's just me. Its completely subjective and depends on how much time and effort your willing to spend with this.
 
You could always try running one on your own anyway. in parallel with your hosted blog. Heh, maybe roundrobin that, and see if you're up to keeping everything at home. Then a few months down the road, you can decide whether to keep or scratch the hosting service and self-host.

Your home connection probably can't handle high traffic, but... if that's not a problem, then why not?

You can still play around with most of the things you have in a hosted environment -- granted that you have a rooted shell.

What I think you should try is hosting it on Amazon's S3/EC2 -- now that'd be an interesting learning experience. And it's so cheap not to... if you can manage your settings right.
 
I run my own web servers off broadband but then I also run FTP, POP3, SMTP and DNS servers on the same machines. I dont use them for hosting a blog, just a test server for php work.
Its a great learning experience and lets you do some really useful things like spam traps. If you're just doing it to save money, dont bother its not expensive and not worth the effort. If you want to do it for other servers/services or just want to learn about such things, go for it.
 
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wow this is a great thread and exactly what i was looking for.

I have a small webserver using windows 7 pro, apache, godaddy bought domains, and ATT uverese. The server is just a small dell 531s slimline with custom cooling using raid. It also serves FTP and home files music and such. Anyway,my IP hasn't changed in 3 years but I can see after all the effort i have gone through (really wasnt too much) to get it up and running and after electricity costs and some paranoia of it going down... it IS NOT worth it. Now i am no web or dns guru so its been a learning experience.

DNS?:

I forwarded the domain i purchased to my IP through Godaddys control panel, but what about dns?...

What DNS ip's should i be using under my Local area connection? Does where you host and dns servers have anything to do with rankings and SEO?

I'm using Godaddys default name servers but i am not hosting with them so i left that default..I'm confused and feel like i'm missing something here.

any help appreciated.
 
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Your DNS records should point to Godaddys dns service. Then you can use godaddys DNS service to support up to 100 records. (Host, subdomain, alias, etc). Have those records point to the IPs you have.

For example I have a domain, using the godaddy DNS, and the domain root and subdomains point to a couple VPS's I lease.
 
Whatsisname said:
Your DNS records should point to Godaddys dns service. Then you can use godaddys DNS service to support up to 100 records. (Host, subdomain, alias, etc). Have those records point to the IPs you have.

For example I have a domain, using the godaddy DNS, and the domain root and subdomains point to a couple VPS's I lease.
Click to expand...


thanks for your reply. in other words...

nameservers;
ns63.domaincontrol.com
ns64.domaincontrol.com


do i need to resolve the ip's of these names and place them under dns in my local area network? i tried that but i got some error under windows. remember i am a newb.
 
your windows DNS has nothing to do with your domains DNS they are not related.

I forwarded the domain i purchased to my IP through Godaddys control panel,
Click to expand...

ALL you need to do is point the URL to your external IP address as you already did, forward the ports to your server (80,443 if using https) and that is it.
 
Its a mixed bag hosting yourself.

You get the absolute freedom to do whatever you want with your server software, and can make changes however you like.

However there are many other factors, as stated earlier cost is one, hassle (IP changes and power outages and things), as well as a sort of minor security risk (but I wouldn't really worry about this).

In the long run, its not really worth the cost different if you just want to host a wordpress blog. 1and1 has beginner packages starting @ $3.99/month right now. If you want to learn about servers and stuff, then its a good project. If you want to run other services off of the same box then its also feasible. I used to run a web server off my HTPC.
 
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