[Klug-general] hosting your own wordpress (was: Relocating my blog?)

[Alan]

There's no dark arts involved in hosting your own, it's certainly 
nothing a linux user should be paying for!

The only cost of hosting yourself is you have to leave the machine on 
24/7 so choose hardware you can afford - at last calculation 200Watts 
running 24/7 comes to nearly 80 quid per year in lecci bills.

Instead you could use an ultra low power device like a Rikomagic.co.uk 
MK802 - linux howto's abound (I am sure there are people on the list who 
have played with them). You don't need a monitor on the server except 
for the initial install perhaps, but thereafter it can run entirely 
headless, use ssh to talk to it.

Cheapest option is use your workday machine, advice is to use a VM like 
VirtualBox (yuk) or KVM (stable). For QEMU/KVM install virt-manager as 
an easy gui. Networking setup on Virtualbox is easier than kvm.

Once you have a plan with hardware, hosting WP yourself is *very 
straighforward*, this is all you need to do:

Do a standard Deb/Fedora install to set up a basic webserver with nginx 
(or apache), mysql and php.  Look for LEMP or LAMP howto's.

Alternatively you could use one of the pre-rolled distros with a control 
panel that do IMAP, SMTP. SSL, proxy, VPN and everything (ClearOS is 
pretty quick to set up and dead stable, Centos6-based), they all have a 
small learning curve though so it's often more useful to do it yerself 
as above.

Now your ready for the easy wordpress install. Once that's running 
migrate your existing WP site:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress

Using TalkTalk you'll probably have a dynamic IP address. To use a 
dynamic IP for server hosting is quite possible:

1) Register a free yourdomain.dyndns.org and get any device on your 
network to keep it updated with changes, usually the router has a 
facility for this, but Linux also has loads like dd-client or ipcheck.
2) In your domain DNS Control Panel use a CNAME record to alias 
yourdomain.org.uk to yourdomain.dyndns.org, so your site will still 99% 
of the time be accessible from sharons.org.uk.
3) Spend some phone time with talktalk asking them to increase you 
upload speed, by default they throttle it in my experience.

Set your router up to forward TCP 80 to your server. Also ssh (22) so 
you have a remote shell. Be sure to allow incoming firewall on server 
for the ports you want.

That's it really. :)

Of course it will all take you some time if you havent done it before, 
but having root on your own webserver is empowering. YOU edit your own 
php.ini and YOU decide how big your want your PHP uploads and memory 
allocation etc. If your skilled (or learning) bash, python, java, php 
etc you can pretty much do anything with your server. (Check out 
imagemagick via php shell it's too much fun)

Perhaps there are others on the list with enough existing knowledge try 
it for themselves, and others to support them as they go?


On 14/10/13 12:48, Sharon Kimble wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Oct 2013 11:08:05 +0100
> Dan Attwood <danattwood at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> if you just have a basic wordpress setup take a look at wordpress.com
> I have two domains registered to me which I want to keep, use and
> transfer, but I'm not sure of how to do it. They are both 'org.uk'
> which makes it a bit simpler. Not sure of what information is required
> of me before I tell 1and1 that I'm moving my sites. So any help,
> advice, sites, tutorials, etc would be very gratefully received.
>
> I am considering self-hosting, but although i have the computer spare
> to do it with, I don't have a spare monitor to use it from. Is it
> possible to host it on this machine I'm on now?
>
> Thanks
> Sharon.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 14 October 2013 10:49, Laurence Southon <laurence at southon.uk.net>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On 14/10/13 09:08, Sharon Kimble wrote:
>>>
>>>> Consequently I'm now looking for alternative hosting for my sites
>>>>
>>> Two suggestions:
>>>
>>> If you want to take the Linux sysadmin route:
>>>
>>> http://www.bytemark.co.uk/
>>>
>>> Or for cheaper shared hosting:
>>>
>>> https://www.vidahost.com/page/**fast-uk-wordpress-hosting<https://www.vidahost.com/page/fast-uk-wordpress-hosting>
>>>
>>> LS
>>>
>
>
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> Kent at mailman.lug.org.uk
> https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/kent

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