Here’s How to Host a Website From Home and What CMS You Should Use For It

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how to host a website from home

If you want to run a website, you need to have it hosted. There are a lot of options to having a fully-hosted site, to self-hosted.

There are pros and cons to each of these options. They often offer an easy way to set up a website, but you don’t have much control.

The best way to set up a website that allows you to have the most control is to set up your own hosting at home.

Do you want to know how to host a website from home? Read on to find out how to set up your own hosting and how to choose a CMS for your website.

How Website Hosting Works

In order to understand how to set up your own hosting at home, you need to understand how a website host works. It’s not as simple as installing a site on your laptop and calling it good.

When you enter a website URL into a browser, there are a lot of steps that happen to make the site appear in seconds.

The URL acts like a phone number. It’s actually an IP address that’s easy to remember. That IP address points to a computer where the website’s files are stored. That computer is called a server.

When the URL is clicked or typed, that device will send a request along with the internet to the website’s servers. The server serves those files that make up the website and sends those files across the internet network to the requesting browser.

The browser will interpret those files and put them together into a coherent website. That’s the end result that you see.

Most website owners don’t know much about web hosting and how it works. They sign up with a website host that owns and maintains a lot of servers. What they’re doing is renting space on those servers, and most likely sharing that space with a lot of other accounts.

How to Host a Website from Home

When you host a website from home, you’re in total control of your website. You’re not sharing a server with a lot of unknown accounts.

You’re also responsible for providing your own server and maintaining it. Plus, you need to make sure that your server speeds are outstanding because a slow website will defeat the purpose of having any sort of advantage of hosting from home.

If you’re comfortable doing that, you can explore the possibilities of hosting a website from home.

How’s Your Home Connection?

The very first thing you need to check is your internet service provider. Most home plans aren’t set up for website hosting, even if you provide the servers. They may limit the data used which can limit your website speeds.

Thanks to the end of net neutrality, you want to keep an eye on your ISP. They may throttle data, leaving your website out in the cold at peak times.

Pick Your Hardware

You’ll need to have a good hardware setup to build your server. Generally speaking, the faster, the better. You could use an older desktop computer, but you want to make sure that it can handle the demands of your site.

If you think that your site is going to get a lot of traffic, you’ll want to invest in an SSD Drive and a machine with a lot of RAM.

Linux vs. Windows vs. Mac

You have to choose the operating system that will power the server. You can use a clean open-source OS like Linux or use Windows or Mac.

Most web servers use Linux because it’s open-source and it can be customized to meet your specific needs. That’s a huge advantage over Windows or Mac.

It really depends on your needs. If you need a high-level of customization or you want to learn about Linux, choose that. If you want to go with something you already know, you can go with one of the traditional operating systems.

Install Hosting Software

Hosting software is meant to give your computer hardware instructions on how to serve website data. There are commonly used platforms, depending on which operating systems you decided to use.

For example, Linux servers use Apache, NGINX, or Lighttpd. If you’ve ever had web hosting with another service, you may already be familiar with Apache or NGINX. These are two commonly used platforms.

Windows machines can use Windows Server IIS.

Once you install your hosting platform, you’ll need to open up ports on your internet network’s router to handle the incoming traffic and outgoing requests.

Create a Database

Your website is comprised of many different files, all of them held in a database. If you use WordPress or Drupal as your content management system, that database is MySQL.

You need to install and create your MySQL database on the server.

Install Your Domain Name

You know how your URL or domain name acts like a phone number in the online world. You now have to install your phone number on your server.

So, when someone types in or clicks on a link to your website, your server knows that someone is trying to “call” your website.

Choosing Your CMS

Your next step is to choose your CMS to run your website. This is the backend of the site where you design the look of the site and add content to each page.

WordPress is by far the most popular CMS while Drupal is another widely-used platform. There are a lot of factors to choosing the right CMS for you, such as your website needs and your server can handle.

Hosting Your Website from Home

The world of website hosting is a pretty complex one. It’s a big reason why so many website owners choose to pay for website hosting plans.

If you’re brave and want full control over your site, you can learn how to host a website from home. It can be a fun experiment to learn more about computing or it can drive your business.

When you have your website set up, you’ll want to read this article to learn how to set your site up for SEO.