Simple hosting init guide

A simple rough guide with some snippets for people that want to get into hosting and have some experience. Not extremely beginner/noob friendly.

Ingredients

• Get a server, a homelab works (must have an external IPv4 or a VPS to tunnel to, see tunnels) or something from a VPS provider
• Get a domain, DuckDNS works if you need something free
• Some terminal skills

Getting started, adding the domain to the server IPv4.

Make sure to add the IPv4 of the public server to your DNS as an A record; simple screenshot below. (This image is taken from landchad.net, a site by Luke Smith which is a simple hosting guide.)

Installing and configuring a webserver

apt update
apt upgrade
apt install nginx nginx-common

Editting the configuration

$EDITOR /etc/nginx/sites-available/somesite

Example block for HTML/a static site:

server {
        listen 80 ; # Server on IPv4
        listen [::]:80 ; # Also serve on IPv6
        server_name example.me ; # Set a server name, domain (must be pointed to your server!)
        root /var/www/html/example-site ; # Webserver root directory
        index index.html; # Which files to serve when hitting / or dir/
        location / { 
                try_files $uri $uri/ =404 ; # Grab HTML, if it's not there, return 404
        }
}

Example block for PHP:

server {
        listen 80; # Server on IPv4
        listen [::]:80 ; # Also serve on IPv6
        server_name _; # Server on any server name/domain.

        root /var/www/html/example-site; # Webserver root directory
        index index.html index.php; # Which files to serve when hitting / or dir/

        location ~ \.php$ { # When a PHP file gets requested, request PHP to serve it
               include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
               fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php-fpm.sock;
        }
        location / { # When a file that should end with .php gets requested as file instead of file.php, return the file.php page
          try_files $uri $uri/ @extensionless-php;
        }

        location @extensionless-php { # When a file that should end with .php gets requested as file instead of file.php, return the file.php page
          rewrite ^(.*)$ $1.php last;
        }
}

Make the HTML which NGINX will grab

Of course, you need to have either HTML or PHP at the directory you specify as the root; for example:

mkdir -p /var/www/html/example-site
cat <<EOF >> /var/www/html/example-site/index.html
<p>Your example text</p>
EOF

Enable the NGINX server

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/mywebsite /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
systemctl reload nginx

Firewall

Some VPS providers have a firewall preinstalled. Some others have it in the interface, you should check if it does not work after enabling the NGINX server.

ufw allow 80
ufw allow 443

To be continued!