How to Host Your Own Website from Home (Plus 5 Pros & Cons)

Learning how to host your own website sounds like a daunting task, no matter if it’s your first site or 100th. Fortunately, you have tons of options when figuring out where to house your burgeoning online presence.

Just as your choices for making a website range from super-simple site builders to demanding hand-coding, hosting a website can be as easy — or as difficult — as you wish. We much prefer coupling performance and security upgrades with peace of mind by finding a respected hosting provider, but the more adventurous may opt to run a server from home.

Hosting your own website still has some serious obstacles, including dynamic IP addresses, bandwidth constraints, and electricity costs, but we can walk you through how to set up a server for Windows- or Linux-based sites. Up first, take a look at our favorite hosting services, or skip ahead using the links below:

Buy Hosting: Cheap ($0.01+) | VPS ($5+) | Dedicated ($70+)

Host Your Own Server: Windows PC | Linux | Pros & Cons

Instead of trying to host a website locally, you can go through a hosting provider and still have the same control of server management. Shared hosting is the best for beginners and those who need affordable solutions, while virtual and dedicated server options allocate more server resources and fine-grain control.

Best Cheap (Shared) Hosting

For those looking for the easiest way to host your own website, look no further than the affordable shared hosting providers listed below. Don’t let the low prices fool you — these companies provide premium services with personable tech support available 24/7. Shared computing resources mean you sacrifice a little bit of flexibility, but you should find all your software needs met with easy one-click installations and automatic SSL certificates. Take a look at our reviews of the best that shared hosting has to offer:

More shared hosting providers »

Best VPS Hosting

The primary advantage with a VPS, or virtual private server, is scalability — and the fact that you can scale up resources only as you need them, making it cost-efficient, too. You get maximum flexibility, whether you choose a managed service or opt to handle server configurations and maintenance yourself. Check out reviews of the VPS providers we recommend if this alternative sounds up your alley:

More VPS hosting providers »

Best Dedicated Servers

The perks to dedicated hosting include as much RAM and processing power as you want, complete isolation so a neighboring website’s demise won’t bring down your own, and the best uptime and performance stats money can buy — and we’re not talking a boatload of money. While dedicated servers are the priciest of the server types, they’re a dream when compared to the costs and headaches of hosting a website yourself. Below are a few top-recommended dedicated server plans:

More dedicated server providers »

For the more adventurous tech nerds out there, and we mean that endearingly, there are few greater allures than running your own machine. Cut out the third-party hosting providers

Windows: How to Host Your Own Website Using Your PC as a WAMP Server

First, let’s try hosting a website using your personal computer with the Windows operating system. Less than one-third of all websites use Windows, meaning your hosting options tend to be a little more limited than those of Linux developers. But if ASP.NET and C are what you code in, then Windows is the way to go.

Step 1: Get Started With WAMP

To make this super easy, we’ll use a WAMP installation program (of which there are several) called WampServer. This will cover your Windows, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. You could also opt to install each package manually, but this process requires much more work and is error-prone.

First, download the 32-bit or 64-bit WAMP-binary here, follow the on-screen instructions, and launch WampServer when it’s done. (Note: There may be a port 80 conflict with your Skype software, but there’s a fix for that.)

Upon installation, a www directory will be created automatically. You’ll likely find it here: c:wampwww

From that directory, you can create subdirectories (called “projects” in WampServer), and put any HTML or PHP files inside those subdirectories. If you click on the localhost link in the WampSever menu or open your internet browser with the URL http://localhost, you should be shown the main screen of WampServer.

Step 2: Create an HTML Page and Configure MySQL

To test our WampServer, we can put an example file called “info.php” into our www-directory. Go directly to this directory by clicking “www directory” in the WampServer menu. From there, create a new file with the sample code below and save it.

Now you can browse to http://localhost/info.php to see the details of your PHP installation. You can create any HTML and PHP file structure to suit your needs.

If you click on the phpMyAdmin menu option, you can start configuring your MySQL databases (which may be needed for a CMS like WordPress). The phpMyAdmin login screen will open in a new browser window. By default, the admin username will be root, and you can leave the password field blank.

From there, you can create new MySQL databases and alter existing ones. Most software, like WordPress, will automatically set up a new database for you, though.

Step 3: Make the Site Public

By default, the Apache configuration file is set to deny any incoming HTTP connections, except in the case of someone coming from the localhost. To make your site publicly accessible, you need to change the Apache configuration file (httpd.conf). You can find and edit this file by going to the WampServer menu, clicking Apache, and selecting httpd.conf. Find these few lines of code:

In the screenshot above, you would replace line 2 with “Order Allow,Deny” and change line 3 to “Allow from all.”

Restart all WampServer services by clicking “Restart All Services” in the menu. The site should now be accessible from beyond your localhost. Confirm there isn’t a PC firewall blocking web requests. You may need to set up port-forwarding on your internet router as well.

Step 4: Using a Domain Name

To use a domain name with your WAMP installation, we’ll need to configure some files first. Let’s assume that our example.com domain has an A record in your DNS with the IP address 100.100.100.100.

First, we need to add the following line to the C:Windowssystem32driversetchosts file:

100.100.100.100 example

Next, we need to edit the httpd.conf file again (accessible via the WampServer menu) to add a virtual host. Once that file is open, look for “Virtual hosts,” and uncomment the line after it, which should be this:

# Virtual hosts
Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

Now, we need to manually add a file in “C:wampbinapacheApache-VERSIONconfextra” (VERSION is your Apache version). Create a file in Notepad, or your text editor of choice. Add the following code, and save the file in that Apache directory.

Click “Restart All Services” in the WampServer menu to activate these changes. Confirm your site is accessible via its domain name. Voila!

Linux: How to Host Your Own Website on a Linux Machine

Let’s now cover how to set up Apache, MySQL, and PHP on a Linux system. LAMP stacks are the most common Linux hosting configuration but don’t be afraid to play with NGINX or LiteSpeed webservers.

Step 1: Install Your Software Using the Terminal

To start our LAMP software install, type the following in the terminal:

sudo apt install apache2 mysql-server php libapache2-mod-php7.0

During the installation process, you will be asked to enter (and re-enter) a password for the MySQL root user. Technically, it’s not necessary (as it should have been done upon installation), but just to be sure, we will restart the Apache webserver.

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Any time you change the global configuration of Apache, you need to execute the command below, unless you do the configuration using local .htaccess files.

Step 2: Check PHP

To confirm your PHP server works and see what PHP modules are currently available, you can place a test PHP file in the webserver root directory (/var/www/html/):

sudo echo "" > /var/www/html/info.php

We can now visit that PHP page by browsing to http://localhost/info.php.

You should see the currently running PHP version, current configuration, and currently installed modules. Note that you can later install other PHP modules using the Ubuntu package manager, as some PHP applications might require that. To determine which extra modules are available, search within the graphical package manager, or simply use the command line:

apt search php | grep module

Step 3: Check MySQL

As most content management systems, including WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, use MySQL databases, we should also confirm our installation worked and the software is fully updated. To see if your MySQL installation is working, type “service mysql status” into the terminal.

If you don’t see that the MySQL Community Server started, you can type “sudo service mysql restart” to restart the MySQL server. From here, we can use the MySQL command-line client to manage databases.

For this, we need to use the admin credentials we typed earlier when MySQL was installed. Reach the login prompt by entering:

$ mysql -u root -p

The CMS will often automatically create the database for you, but sometimes you need to do something to the database manually. PHPMyAdmin is a friendly database management tool most web experts will recommend.

Finally, configure the /etc/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php file using the steps described here.

Step 4: Configure DNS

To use your own domain for your local web server, you’ll need to configure Apache to accept web requests for your domain. First, make sure your domain’s DNS has an A record (which points to a specific IP address) for your domain name, e.g., www.example.com. Your DNS hosting provider will have online tools to correctly set up these DNS records.

Once that is done, we’ll use the dig tool. To request the A record for www.example.com, type:

$ dig www.example.com A	 
;; ANSWER SECTION:	 
www.example.com. 86400 IN A 100.100.100.100	 
AUTHORITY SECTION:	 
example.com. 86398 IN NS a.iana-servers.net.	 
example.com. 86398 IN NS b.iana-servers.net.

You can use this tool to direct a URL, such as http://www.example.com, to the server with an IP address you specify.

Step 5: Configure Apache

Now, we need to tell Apache to accept web requests for our name www.example.com and from what directory to serve content when we get those requests. To do that, we’ll set up a directory for our example.com domain.

Create an example index.html file before setting some filesystem permissions using the code above.

To see the page, the last step is to set up a Virtual Host file for Apache for our domain.

sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com.conf

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/example.com.conf

Now edit the file to look like this (the optional comments are not shown here):

Next, reload Apache for the changes to take effect:

sudo a2ensite example.com.conf

sudo service apache2 reload

Edit your local /etc/hosts file by adding a line with your IP address and domain name. Be sure to change the “100.100.100.100” to match the IP address of your domain:

100.100.100.100 example.com

We can now visit your self-hosted site by going to http://www.example.com.

So we’ve covered that it’s doable — but just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Let’s look at the pros and cons.

The Upside

The upshot: Setting up your own website and its hosting is not just a highly educational experience but it’s rather fun to execute. It’s a geeky project, sure, but if you’re reading this, you probably fall into the category of folks who would call that fun.

Once you’ve done it, you will have the power to make any system changes you desire. A lot of folks have gone from learning to host a site locally to tackling more complex programming, web design, and online commerce. The experience is the biggest draw.

The Downsides

Unfortunately, there are still quite significant downsides to self-hosting your website:

1. You’ll experience slow connections compared to professional hosts. Your ISP upload speed is likely much slower than your download speed, so serving content to your website visitors will be very slow, too.
2. You have to deal with an ever-changing (dynamic) IP address. Though there are DNS configuration tools to help with this somewhat, this can potentially cause problems at any time.
3. It costs a lot of electricity and you’ll run into power outages often.
4. You’re responsible for hardware and software maintenance.

So you can see why we highly encourage investing in a quality web host for your site or application. And we have you covered there, too. Take a look at the types of hosting available to see what hosting options are out there and within your budget.

Although we covered the steps to setting up a good website hosting system on both Windows and Linux, I’d like to remind everyone that self-hosting is ultimately not practical for any serious project. While we can hope this will become more feasible in the future, it’s not the case as of late.

Hosting your own website is akin to those who can build their own PC or reassemble an engine. Those achievements are quite possible for seasoned pros and perhaps even highly motivated beginners — but the end results often can’t stack up in the long run with the commercially built counterparts. The hosting providers we featured at the beginning of the article have been in the industry for decades and simply know how to host websites at scale.

Fun fact: There are folks working on distributed content-serving ideas. Projects like IPFS could allow people to create decentralized content hosting networks — eventually. The internet keeps surprising us, so who knows what the future of hosting holds! Follow us to follow the industry and all its twists and turns.