Mk(dir)ing The Change
So here we are Dec of 2010, still paying a ridiculous amount of money on hosting fees, not having full control of features that I want/need because of security issues. Ah the joys of having a shared server. It all made sense 5 years ago when I first started EnVmyZ.com but now the site just sits. I hardly ever update anymore and still pay the monthly charge. I’ve come up with a 2 dollar a month solution and will be using that instead. It’s called home server, OSX Snow Leopard Server to be exact and a company called No-Ip to be my nameservers.
Server Setup
Server setup was easy in all honestly. I had purchased a copy of Snow Leopard Server on ebay. Not really sure what I was getting myself into I did a little research on the web. SLS (Snow Leopard Server) has alot of great features that are very easy to use with minimal unix command usage.
Wordpress Install
Installation of wordpress was a breeze, however setting permissions correctly proved to be a difficult task as there was only a handful of tutorials on install WP on SLS. The problem comes from installing WP on a user’s account, which the folder/file are then owned by that person. Apache then has no rights to modify these files. The site would have worked front end wise, but no automatic plugin installs or server side scripts would have run. The fix was easy though.
sudo chown -R _www main
Once this command was complete, all was well for me.
DNS Setup
Well the first obstacle that ran into is my ISP wanted an extra 10 dollars a month just so I could have a static IP address. So I figured that had to be a way around that, which of course there is. There are website out there dedicated to DynamicDNS hosting. So how this works, I signed up for a free account over at http://no-ip.com and was able to register envmyz.com pretty easy and it only costs 25 dollars a year, versus the 179 i’m paying now for dedicated hosting via cirtexhosting. Since I own envmyz.com I was able to change the nameservers from cirtex to no-ip’s. Within an hour, I had envmyz.com point at my local server’s IP address.
