Setting up a home server, for personal use

Hosting
1

Hello!

I’m not sure if this has been answered yet, but if it has, I couldn’t find it in the forums.

So I have a machine with Linux on it, and I’m looking to set it up as a home server that I can use for web development that I can connect 2-3 computers to (mac/XP/vista)… and I was wondering if anyone has any good suggestions on how to go about this (tutorials, videos, online guides, etc…)?

I know about XAMPP but i’ve has nothing but trouble with it… I’ve had a lot of trouble with MySQL and I just can’t get it figured out.

Thanks for any suggestions!

2

Considering you have a machine dedicated to this I wouldn’t recommend XAMPP. Look at your distro’s tutorials for setting up a webserver instead. Do it yourself and you will learn a lot about how the server end of things works. It really isn’t all that hard.

3

Sounds good that you already have a Linux ready system(which is appropriate choice for starting a web server);

as far as a ‘how-to’ is concerned - i believe this is exactly what you are looking for at the moment:

Apache&msql server + wordpress on linux

Yup, that being said - there is nothing better then Apache + Linux combination when it comes to setting up a web server :slight_smile:

4

Installed Ubuntu as my server… which has installed great!

I’m excited to get a hold of this whole linux/apache thing… should be fun. Going through the tutorials now. Thanks for both your inputs! Deeply appreciate it.

5

If you’re having problems with XAMP then instal WAMP. It comes with PHP/MYSQL and Apache.

6

Howtoforge.com has a lot of good tutorials on things like setting up servers for development, even for live hosting.

Web / Mail / FTP etc. Have a look through the guides and pick one that fits what you want to do and hte OS you are using.

7

I actually found a good tutorial on net.tutsplus.com…
How to Setup a Dedicated Web Server for Free | Nettuts+

got a little confused on the firewall part, but might not worry about is since it’ll only be a local machine.

8

  1. there are end number of reason for people who may want to set up there own server in their computer.

  2. if the customer have high speed internet connection which has a high cap on the output, then the customer could hold a small website in their computer.

  3. the only thing the customer wants is he/she should be able to access files on their home computer from anuwhere.

  4. when the customer set up their home server in their computer, they are installing a piece of software which will allow them to communicate with other computers on the internet.

  5. to setup a personal server in your computer, you must invest some time in security.

  6. apache is the most popular web server it’s an open source web server that is very stable and will work on a variety of operating systems.

9

Don’t do the mistake of overtrusting your own server when you decide to go live with a website. Some people start with personal use, but then decide to go live with the same server. Don’t forget that a real server built to serve websites to outer world needs to be located in a datacenter with good connection, fire surpression, power redundancy and all sort of other systems needed.

10

Well i would not recommend running a server on your home computer as it is a risky undertaking, and before you start, make sure your computer has all the latest patches and security updates, and that you’ve done a thorough spyware and virus scan.
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