Is there an easy way to host my own website & email on a tablet?

I've been thinking about how I could free myself from third party web and email hosts and was thinking about getting a cheap new tablet, leaving it plugged into an outlet and figuring out a way to host my own website and email through it.

Is there any step by step instructions out there yet to do this? I hear it's possible to host your own primitive website through a tablet but the instructions I found looked a little complicated, although they were about a year old. I'm hoping things have gotten easier since then.

Most importantly, I want to ween myself off of advertiser driven third party email accounts and just third party hosted email hosting in general.

Is this a good idea or would it be safer to stick with a third party email provider?

Thanks.

 

If any part of your website or email is important, this is not a good solution. If it was a hobby site or something of that nature, then it could be considered as a "low cost solution." Especially if this is going to be run through your home network. There are many more viable solutions that are still very cheap, but much more reliable and secure. If you have the knowledge to setup and run web and email servers, I would suggest getting a low-end VPS (there are Windows versions if you are most comfortable with that OS). You can find them for <$10/mo for Linux and <$20/mo for Windows. These are, preferably, going to be hosted inside data centers with dedicated high speed connections and all the power backups and redundancies one would need for optimal up-time. You can use a free control panel like VirtualMin to administer the server, or you can pay ~$15/mo extra for a VPSOptimized cPanel/WHM license for familiarity/ease of use. Hope this helps!

 

It does help. Thank you. I'm rethinking the whole idea. The only reason I thought about this is because I wonder how honest third party cpanel email hosts really are? I mean, we sign up for web and email hosting with hosting providers but we don't really know who these people are and how much access they have to our content.

 

Honestly these days, the only one you can be sure of the actions and intentions of, is yourself. Any company can bury something in their TOS or Privacy Notice about gathering data from you and be totally within the law to do so.

Just understand that if you run your own servers, you are MORE at risk than at a third-party's service, unless it is properly hardened (secured) against attacks. Your email server can be compromised and used as a relay for sending spam for example. You could get reported, have you account suspended/terminated, or even have the IP to your server blacklisted. The later would mean your server would still be online and fully functional, but recipient servers using blacklist databases won't accept your email. I've been there, and it's frustrating!! I would fully educate yourself on hosting web and email servers before making a decision. It is far more than installing programs and creating accounts.

 

If you want to block access to content, it being either mail or other files on your server, you'll need to run a box on your own network, and also know what you're doing. There is ALWAYS ways to get to the content on a machine that's not physically where you're at. Now, since we've concluded that nothing is safe, you'll have to do a threefold cost/benefit/risk analysis - and mostly, you'll realise that your best bet is often existing services.
If you want to increase the security of your emails, there are ways to do so, via encryption and similar implementations, but then again - why? Do you send top-secret information via email? If you do, you're a moron. If not, relax, and go with a reasonable security, and avoid sending that latest email to your accountant where you confess stealing every second penny from the corporate account. Besides, any communication between two or more persons, runs the risk of being exposed - there's always printers, or cameras or or or. Just relax already. No information is safe, just learn to live with it, plan for it, and don't panic when something goes awry.

 

It's not about anything that I'm sending or doing. It's about people possibly gaining access to my bank, credit card and other accounts through gaining access to my email. My admittedly amateur thought process behind this is, if a third party email service is providing me with an email account, can't anyone working there just get into my email and start rummaging through my emails looking for accounts to request passwords for? Or steal that unpublished 400 page novel I just emailed to myself? Stuff like that… in other words, provided they had decent email security, wouldn't everyone be better off if they controlled their own email server?

I really appreciate the advice I'm getting from both you and Slate, as, although I have a sense of what I'd like to do, beyond downloading the necessary apps, setting this and that and following steps, I have very little idea what the risks and ISP policies are with a DIY email server or if there is truly anything serious to fear from a third party email host. I'm not worried that I will do anything illegal. I'm worried the people I have any email account with, other than myself, might.

What do you think of boa?

 

The point is, this kind of paranoia doesn't really track. If you're paranoid about using, say, Gmail or Hotmail (or Outlook as it's called today), or any other rather well-known provider's email-offerings, what makes you think installing a third-party app on your own server is any safer? What prevents those who wrote the code for the program from putting in a secret forwarding-rule, which forwards all the emails you receive and send to their own server? Or gives them access, via some backdoor, to your server and the installation?

My point is, the paranoia never ends. Unless you spend extreme amounts of time configuring and actually looking through the code running on your server, you'll not be secure. Basically, only way to be relatively secure, is to use services that have been tried and tested and are fully in the public domain, so that user's have been privvy to their shortcomings from the very beginning - basically, as far as I'm aware, the most secure *nix-distro available is still a protected *BSD-install, running a proper setup of both internal and external firewalls etc. And this brings us to my final point - unless you do this for a living, you have NO CLUE how to set this up to make sure it's properly secured. Hence, stick to the big names. At least, if something really bad happens, like an unfaithful servant, who takes control of your life, you'll probably get something back, simply because the bad publicity will cost more than actually just paying you to shut up about it.

 

Couldn't agree with you more. I kind of suspected someone more knowledgable might come to these conclusions but I didn't have the knowledge to put it into words.

Also if a big name email provider, like Gmail, does have a serious security breech, because they are so public they are going to be held to the coals for it so it makes sense that they would want to avoid that like you said.

My hope was that if I set up my own DIY mail server at home, nobody would really know it was there and so ignore it and someone with bad intent would really want to target bigger fish, like the big free email providers, with more accounts. Not some lone guy in the suburbs with his own tablet email server. At least that was my line of thinking.

I got lucky with this thread and I couldn't have gotten better advice on this from you both…This is all exactly what I needed to know…Thank you.

 

mike, honestly, I don't see the need for what you are asking. There are also very cheap dedicated servers that are great for a couple of sites and emails and you have full control of what's going on in the server. Also VPS is a good idea and there are also other solutions like shared hosting if you need to save money.

 

And, take note - never, ever think that because you're a "nobody", your server isn't interesting. A badly secured mailserver is worth lots to spammers, for one.

 

It's not recommended at all to host a website on a tablet, computer if you take it seriously, I do know people who host minecraft on their windows computer but that would be as far as I would go. Why? Because if your ISP finds out you might be charged triple the cost for use of their bandwidth. Datacenters are made for hosting servers and have good speeds, you can get a VPS for $5 and they are stable to use .

 

I would also not recommend hosting your website or email from your home on any device, I have done it in the past for a test site and such when I was first elarning web design and sever structure but for a truly secure and reliable service do not do that. You are much better off buying a vps from a company or a shared hosting account at a low cost than you are running your own sever. Just check out the company make sure they are able to answer any of your questions via the pre sales before signing up that will help you alot in choosing a good provider as there are hundreds of providers and they may be resellers of a larger company or may not know how to fix any issues you may have or assist you in fixing them if you go with an unmanaged vps or dedicated server.