raspberrypi

The Issue

Meet my new web server! Isn’t it cute? Up till recently I have been running my website on my home machine. This has worked fine as this site doesn’t get a ton of traffic and my home machine is fairly beefy. However, I’ve always been slightly leery about running my web server on my main computer just for security reasons. If it were to get hacked I could be potentially opening up everything to the hackers. Not only that, in order for the site to be up I had to leave my home machine running 24/7. This is not great on the electricity bill. Also, during the summer months in our not so air-conditioned house it actually adds significantly to the heat. Which is not too fun for my wife who has to been home all day in the heat while I sit at work in the air-conditioning.

The Solution

So, I started looking around for a not too expensive solution to this. As I researched I started seeing more and more people running WordPress on a Raspberry Pi. Now, I can muck my way around Linux, but it’s certainly not my forté. Fortunately, I found a great tutorial for installing WordPress on a Raspberry Pi that even a Linux noob like me can follow.

It worked great! I was able to get WordPress set up, move my content over and flip the port forwarding over to the Pi within a few hours. I also set up a dynamic DNS client on the PI to keep my address current with my domain registrar. I now have a separate server, that runs on pennies, puts out little to no heat, is completely quiet, and cost very little to purchase. I could not be happier.