How To Build A Personal Web Server For WordPress

For many WordPress bloggers and WordPress Developers – both WordPress Theme Developers, WordPress Plugin Developers, and WordPress Programming Developers – having your own personal web server is something that can help save you a lot of time. Today I received an email from one of my readers, Teresa, who asked me for some advice on how she can create her own personal web development server and run it off her own personal computer. Here is the email.

Hi Garry,
Thanks for the opportunity to ask you questions and to get answers.

My question is how do you set up some kind of development server on
your own computer, so that you can work on your site and be able to
check everything without it being live? If possible step by step instructions.

Thanks
Teresa

Teresa wants what many WordPress bloggers and developers want. She wants to be able to have her own sandbox so that she can test things safely offline while not having to worry about uploading things to a web server. Having your own personal web server is quite fun, very rewarding and can save you a ton of time.

In order to have your own personal web server, you have to have the same programs installed on your computer that web servers have installed. Fortunately most of these programs are all open source and don’t cost a dime.

The bare minimum of a web server includes: server software (Apache), database software (MySQL), and a programming language (PHP). These programs are also all that is needed to host a WordPress blog.

Check out WampServer. This is a free and very neat download that bundles Apache, MySQL and PHP into one easy to install package on your personal computer running Windows. (Apache, MySQL, PHP, Windows) Thus the name WAMP.

Sometimes doing things like this can be tricky. Believe me I know (and so does Mark Mason — I was bugging him a few months ago about this) but the great thing about WampServer is their support forum. It is packed full of information that can help you. Although in my case, I really didn’t need any help getting WampServer installed on my PC. I did however, need a little help getting WordPress up and running, but the folks in the forum were there to help.

So if you have been wanting to run your own little web server off your own personal computer, I would strongly recommend giving WampServer a try. You can even go so far as to stop paying for web hosting and run your entire blog off your own personal computer.

Before you decide to do that though, I would strongly recommend against doing that unless you have a super fast Internet connection and a very stable computer that can handle multiple connections at once. Also keep in mind, if your computer fails or if you lose Internet, your blog will be unreachable to your readers.

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