When you’re wanting to host a website and have the general public access it, the usual route would be to choose a hosting company and pay a monthly fee. But what if you didn’t want to have yet another subscription siphoning funds from your bank account? If you have a Synology NAS, you can host a website on the enclosure in minutes!
How to host a website on Synology NAS
Hosting a website on a Synology NAS couldn’t be easier. Simply follow these steps and you’ll be up and running in no time at all:
- Connect to your Synology NAS.
- Open Package Center.
- Download and install the following packages:
- Web Station
- Apache HTTP Server 2.4
- PHP 7.4
- Make sure the http group has sufficient permissions on the website root folder.
- Go to Control Panel > Security > Firewall and configure firewall rules (allow 80 for HTTP and 443 for HTTPS).
- Go to Control Panel > External Access > Router Configuration and configure port forwarding.
- Go to Web Station > Web Service Portal and select Default server.
- Click Edit.
- Choose the HTTP and PHP profiles.
- Change Script Language Settings to PHP and select the profile.
- Click Edit.
- Select all the checkboxes on the Extensions tab.
- Click Save.
Why you may not want to host websites on NAS
Hosting a website on Synology NAS is great if you have a solid network connection, a static IP address, and don’t mind utilizing a portion of your network connection for server traffic. The issue arises when your network connection drops and the server is no longer accessible to the outside world.
Going it alone will also see you locked out of any support offered by web hosting companies. A Synology NAS enclosure is fantastic for many tasks, but running more than one intensive process on the same server can cause issues when a process requires considerable levels of performance.
Should you be indexing files, hosting a website, running a virtual machine, and streaming a movie through Plex all on the same server, overall system performance may take a hit. But for a small blog or even a family website that’s only viewable while on the LAN would be a perfect fit for Synology NAS.
Synology DiskStation DS220+
The Synology DiskStation DS220+ has everything you need to set up and host your own websites, including an Intel processor, two drive bays, and upgradable DDR4 RAM.
Seagate IronWolf
Seagate’s IronWolf range of storage drives is specifically designed for use in NAS. If you’re looking to store data and media, and even set up a website or two, an IronWolf HDD would be a great place to start.
