DIY Hosting

Back in 2019, I built a WordPress website and hosted it on Bluehost. It was a good learning experience in many ways but what I didn’t learn was anything about the backend workings of how a website actually functions. This is why you pay Bluehost, to deal with all the difficult technical stuff so you can just focus on creating content. I love difficult technical stuff, and also saving money on hosting fees, so this year I decided to cancel Bluehost and try to host my website on my own.

You can actually do this for practically free. The only real expense is the actual web server. Fortunately Raspberry Pi is perfect for this. Unfortunately, in 2023, Raspberry Pis are almost impossible to get for msrp. I ended up paying a premium for one on Amazon.

Here are the steps:

Initial Raspberry Pi setup and SSH

1. Buy a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, 64GB+ microSD card and Raspberry Pi USB-C power supply.

2. Insert the microSD card into your laptop and format it to exFAT.

3. Download the Raspberry Pi Imager from https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/ and run the installer.

4. Run the installed Raspberry Pi Imager app and choose the operating system as Raspberry Pi OS (other) and then Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit).

5. A gear icon will appear. Select it and configure settings as shown below. Change the default password from “raspberry” to something more secure.

6. Choose the storage as the microSD card select WRITE.

7. Eject the microSD card and insert it in the Raspberry Pi. Connect the power supply and let it boot up and automatically connect to Wi-Fi.

8. Open a command prompt and type ssh pi@raspberrypi. Enter the password set previously (it will not show). If you see pi@raspberrypi:~ $ then you are successfully logged into the raspberry pi.

Installing LAMP and WordPress

1. Install any updates and upgrades

sudo apt update

sudo apt upgrade

2. Install the web server Apache 2

sudo apt install apache2

3. Install the web development scripting language PHP

sudo apt install php

sudo apt install php-mysql

4. Install the SQL database MariaDB

sudo apt install mariadb-server

5. Restart the web service

sudo service apache2 restart

6. Change directory

cd /var/www/html

7. Remove index file

sudo rm index.html

8. Install WordPress

sudo wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

9. Extract file

sudo tar xzf latest.tar.gz

10. Move file from wordpress directory to current html directory

sudo mv wordpress/* .

11. Remove old wordpress directory and old file

sudo rm wordpress

sudo rm latest.tar.gz

12. Change ownership of files

sudo chown -R www-data: .

13. Setup database

sudo mysql_secure_installation

14. Select enter. Set a root password to something secure. Select Y to everything that follows. Sign into database

sudo mysql -u root -p

15. Enter the password that was just setup. You should see the prompt MariaDB [(none)]> _ With this prompt, create a database

create database wordpress;

16. Setup a user and password for the database. ‘password’ should be the database password that was just setup

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

17. Flush privileges

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

18. Exit out of MariaDB prompt and back to directory with Ctrl + D. Reboot system

sudo reboot

19. From the pi@raspberrypi:~ $ prompt, configure the file for permalinks

sudo a2enmod rewrite

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf

20. In the nano editor that opens, paste the below html code into the config file

<Directory "/var/www/html">
    AllowOverride All
</Directory>

21. Ctrl + O to Write Out, Enter, Ctrl + X to Exit

22. Restart the Apache web server

sudo service apache2 restart

Setup WordPress site

1. Open a browser and enter the IP address of the Raspberry Pi. This can be found in your Wi-Fi router app under connected devices. You should see the WordPress setup screen. Select English (United States)

2. At the below screen, enter these values. Password is the database password we setup previously.

3. Select Run the installation

4. Create a site title, username and password. Click Install WordPress

5. Login to new WordPress site.

6. Setup permalinks under Settings > Permalinks and select Post name. Save changes

Make website available on the public internet

1. Setup port forwarding on your router. This will vary by router manufacturer but in general use the iOS or Android app to navigate to advanced settings and then port forwarding.

2. Create a new port forward. Select the raspberrypi connected device and forward port 80 and port 443. Select TCP/UDP.

3. Register a domain name. Navigate to DNS and then Custom Resource Records. Create an A record like the below where the ip address is the public ip address, not the private one. This can be found at https://whatismyipaddress.com/

and that’s it, you’re done. All that’s left to do it build the website content and the whole world can see it.

Update

Shortly after successfully hosting this website on the Raspberry Pi, I decided to migrate hosting to AWS Lightsail because I wanted to use the Pi for other projects. The AWS hosting fees are much less than Bluehost for a small blog like this and so I feel pretty good about the switch.