We’ve discussed some of the best blogging platforms and web hosts, but if you prefer to really control your data, there’s no reason you can’t do it all at home. All you need is Virtualbox, a virtual machine (VM) as your web server, and a shared folder for your posts and blog content. Maymay shows us how it’s done.
Maymay’s setup is brilliant in its simplicity. Ultimately, there’s very little a web host is doing aside from running software that you can easily run on your own Linux-based VM, and then talking to an off-server database that contains all of your blog’s posts, media and other content. You can duplicate the setup easily with your own computer, with a VM running in VirtualBox as your web server, and a shared folder on the host computer that has your database in it.
The rest is a matter of configuring VirtualBox and pointing it at the shared folders, installing WordPress on your virtual web server, and then setting up any cross-posting capabilities you might want (Maymay uses it to crosspost to Tumblr, but the self-hosted site is a great escape route in case something changes over there, and serves as an always-updated backup your Tumblr as well) . Ideally, you could just leave this setup on, point your personal domain at your site hosted at home, and let it all fly-then you’re hosting everything at home, on your own, for free. Maymay even includes a pre-configured “Bring Your Own Content” VM for Virtualbox to get you started that supports Tumblr and WordPress out of the box.
Hit the link below to see the whole post. By the time you’re finished with the project, you’ll have your own blog or website, running free, open-source software, on your own computer at home, without paying anyone anything for the privilege. It’s a great way to own your site, your content, and your web presence all by yourself.
Bring Your Own Content: Virtual Self-Hosting Web Publishing [Everything In Between]
Comments
One response to “Host Your Own Blog On A Server You Control With Virtualbox”
Unfortunately you’ve badly misrepresented what the original article was about. The author seemed to indicate that this setup was largely for testing purposes, for which it would work fine. But as a production server for hosting your own website, there are so many problems it’s not funny.
First of all, having to keep the window open otherwise the server shutting down is awful. There are other virtualisation platforms that are better suited to this task and just as easy/free to use (Hyper-V is one, there are others).
Secondly, I would be hesitant about using a pre-rolled VM. It could be doing anything, and you wouldn’t know about it. But more importantly, it’s my belief you should probably only be doing your own hosting if you know enough to set it up yourself… it’s not hard to learn, and you’ll know a lot more about doing security properly because of it.
Lastly, this article actually only deals with the trivially easy part of setting up web hosting – setting up Apache/PHP/MySQL on a Linux machine is pretty damn simple. It’s the port forwarding, DNS configuration, and all that sort of thing that gets mildly tricky.