How To Host Your Own Website For FREE - Home Server Tutorial

I'll show you how to host your own website for free using your computer as a home server. It's quite a fun project!

So you might want to turn your computer into a local testing environment for your WordPress website. Or use your computer as a web hosting server to host your site for free. In this tutorial I will show you the steps you need to take to make this happen.

00:00 - Intro
00:40 - Software Setup
02:15 - WordPress Install
04:20 - Getting Your Site Online
07:45 - Adding a Domain Name
8:30 - Why You Shouldn't Do This
8:50 - Alternatives

#1 Software Setup

You will need a piece of software called WAMP to how your own website for free. It will allow you to install all of the necessary files and turn your computer into a home server.

Once you have WAMP setup the easiest way to get a website online is WordPress.

#2 WordPress Setup

Just download the WordPress files from their website and store it on the website folders created by WAMP. This will allow you to configure the databases and autoinstall WordPress onto your home server.

#3 Getting Your Website Online

The next step is to get your website online, because currently it only exists on your computer. That means, only you can view it. By adding some firewall rules and rerouting traffic through your IP address you can make so every device that's connected to your wifi or local network can access the website. It's a great way to test your creations on multiple devices.

#4 Setting up a domain name

If you want to host your own website you will also need other people to access it that are outside your local network. This can be done by attaching a domain name to your IP address and allowing incoming connections. That way everyone that has the website name can directly access your site that's hosted using your computer.

#5 Why It's a Bad Idea To Host Your Own Website

Your website will only be online as long as your computer is. So if you want for it to work 24/7 you'll need to have your computer on for all that time. It's also quite an unsafe practice as other people will have access to your IP address and can DDoS your site at any time. Hosting your own website you also get 0 benefits that usually come with paid hosting providers like

control panels
SSL certificates
Domain names
Support

While it's a fun project and used to be somewhat relevant before. Now, I just recommend you use a cheap web hosting provider that will take care of everything.

- DISCLOSURE -

I am affiliated, but not sponsored by any hosting provider. This means I might make money when you purchase hosting services through the links provided and I might be able to offer discounts when available. All of my opinions on this channel are always mine!

#HowToHostYourOwnWebsite #HomeServerTutotial

[Emit.Reviews]

Adding the code mentioned at 4:45

#
#Virtual Hosts
#
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName localhost
ServerAlias localhost
DocumentRoot "${INSTALL_DIR}/www"
<Directory "${INSTALL_DIR}/www/">
Options +Indexes +Includes +FollowSymLinks +MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Require local
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

[doobiescoo]

You know what? This is too much to do at 1AM. This is a tomorrow project.

[abdullahal-shimri]

I've been hosting a hobby website on my home server for 2 years and, unbelievably, I get better speed and uptime than my professionally hosted websites. I just added a battery backup in case there is a power out.

[brandonjohnson]

Hosting your own server in today's world is actually more beneficial depending on where you live. For instance where I live I have 5Gbps fiber internet speed and my home server is more powerful and far cheaper than paying $300 a month for a hosting companies crap dedicated server that is only giving me 1 cpu in a 2 cpu per node system. The only thing I could say that a hosting company has better would be unlimited bandwidth but depending on what level of high traffic users you have, it may not be necessary depending on the size of your web pages and how many pages each user goes to before logging out.

[Drak_Thedp]

I'm thinking of hosting my own site on a separate low-power machine. The huge upside is backups. It's a pain to schedule a backup on a web-hosting. You have to do it manually, or pay extra, and then download it manually still. On a home PC you can just schedule it, and it will backup the whole system, and do incremental backups. And you can use an old 10$ (or even free) chunk-a-junk pc, or even android tablet for that.

[mbayaayiga]

I admire the effort in making this video... (the visuals and everything). nice work !! 👍

[harunisjohn]

1. do awesome looking tutorial and lead your watchers to turn their firewall down.
2. at the end of all that say it is all extremly dumb and manipulate your watchers to buy stuff.
3. profit.

[yonathanrodriquez]

Technicality you can run it on a VM and the ip address is only pinned to that VM

[tonnympagim]

Your energy is very inspirational @emit
Thank you for teaching

[KingPBJames]

The reason I'm hosting a website from home is because I run a dedicated gaming server for my friends to play together occasionally and my webserver hosts the custom maps to download.
The website only needs to be up while we're gaming so I just need to make sure it's secure.

[thefinness]

@ 9:00 what you are saying is that its easier to buy the cooked food becuase there are so many chefs cooking for cheap than you learning how to feed yourself and not be dependent on anybody/"websites", for us to be able to provide the world with OUR CONTENT. I disagree my friend i believe it is all the way worth it for us to learn how to host instead of being hosted.

[miwwie]

Is it really that big of a security risk to create your own home server? Especially if it's a small and private server with only a login page. If I use a linux device and enable all the necessary prerequisites for security, it seems more worth it these days than to pay for something like this monthly.

[ashy]

When you purchase hosting, you are buying a SHARE of a larger server, with allocated resources. Often these are capped and throttled, because your app or site is just one of thousands on the same box. Your home webserver is dedicated only to your apps, you get 100% of whatever resources you allocate. When one of my friends mentioned the response times on the hosted were slower than my home server I did some testing to compare, and I found that doing large parses of data was roughly 10 times faster on my home server. The kind of hosting I would need to purchase to keep up with my self-hosted webserver would cost a fortune.

[lfcbpro]

The problem with hosts come after the cheap introductory offer.
Then they charge you HUGE amounts per month.
Some so-called reputable hosts don't even have that amount on their website. Others hide it in the fine print.
Costs can easily got to $20+ a month with no add-ons.
If you only have a small site, do port forwarding correctly and have a good firewall it is a lot cheaper and better to self host.
Also, if not much traffic and a good upload speed, you may get a faster website than some.

[ThatoJChere]

You could do this for practice purposes, may be you could get a job at one of the hosting providers. It helps get an idea of how things really work..

[maggew]

I disagree with most of your "bad idea" reasons. I believe you executed the video exceptionally well, and I understand and appreciate your perspective but using Linux instead of Windows is already a great first step in "doing things right".… WAMP 😂😂

[abrahamnorada]

The point of knowing how to make a farm is knowing what soil to use fertilizers and water consumption etc. and by doing so it showed me why cloud is good

[davidbristol]

The reason I wanted to learn this is because my website has ran out of space. And the hosting is getting expensive to keep upgrading the amount of storage I have.

[KalkuehlGaming]

So the moment I change the ServerName and Listen to the IP Adress, WAMP wont turn green anymore.
and implementing
<Directory />
Order deny, allow
Deny from all
</Directory>
will say I got no permissions, when I try to connect to localhost

[diidimeh]

I'm surprised you didn't just teach us how to create a VM and use THAT as your server to host your website 😳 considering everything is going cloud based anyway... but maybe I'm just overthinking 😂