mockra

With a wide range of cheap hosting options, it’s easy to run multiple static sites for $5 or less. I’m currently using virtual hosts with nginx to serve several sites from a micro instance. Here’s a quick rundown on how to get started using Ubuntu.

Setting up Nginx

The first thing you’ll need to do is install nginx.

sudo apt-get install nginx

We’ll then want to create a directory for storing our public html files, we can do so with the following command. Make sure to replace yourdomain.com with your domain.

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/yourdomain.com/public

We’ll also want to make sure our files are public.

sudo chmod 755 /var/www

The next step will be creating our virtual hosts file, which will tell nginx how to handle our domain.

We can use the default file to get us started. Make sure to replace yourdomain.com with your domain.

sudo cp /etc/nginx/sites-available/default /etc/nginx/sites-available/yourdomain.com

We can then open our file, and update the default template with our information.

sudo vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/yourdomain.com

We’ll want to update the file to reflect the following:

We’ll then want to create a link between the directory we’re using to store our files, and the virtual hosts directory. We can do so with the following command, but make sure to substitute yourdomain.com with your domain.

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/yourdomain.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/yourdomain.com

The final step for setting up our server is restarting nginx.

sudo service nginx restart

Deploying Our Site

While our server is ready to serve our static website, we’ll need to upload our website to the server to start serving our content. While there are more efficient options for deploying our static site, the simplest method is scp.

When running the following command, you’ll want to replace public/* with the directory to your static site files on your local machine, your-directory/*. You’ll also want to replace username@yourdomain.com with the your server information.

You run the following command from your development machine.

scp -r public/* username@yourdomain.com:/var/www/yourdomain.com/public

This will copy the public files from our local machine to the server, so nginx can start serving our static website.

You can repeat the steps you’ve just taken for any additional sites you would like to add to the server.

Cloudflare

An additional step we can take is setting up a CDN like Cloudflare. This will allow us to serve our pages much more quickly. If you decide to use Cloudflare, you can setup a custom page rule, and set the cache level to Cache everything.