Welcome, dear readers, to the final piece in our long-running “Web Served” series. Starting last November, Ars has been helping to shed light on the fun world of DIY Web hosting—we started with setting up Nginx on Ubuntu, and we’ve progressed to advanced application hosting with PHP and even Node.js.

Along the way we’ve struggled with the command line and probably cursed at typos in config files. We’ve felt the incredible triumph of a simple “success” log file message and the crushing defeat of an error that appears to be happening for absolutely no reason. If you’ve stuck with us for the entire spread of articles, you’ve got a full-featured Web server capable of safely and quickly serving pages and running a wide range of awesome applications. Congratulations are in order—good job!

At this point you’ve got a functional Nginx Web server that’s configured with an eye toward speed and security. You’ve got it configured with SSL/TLS, (maybe) have some official certificates, and can serve data encrypted. You’ve got PHP set up along with the MySQL-compatible MariaDB, so you can handle serving most popular Web applications. Speaking of applications, you also probably have a WordPress blog, a Vanilla forum, and maybe even your own MediaWiki wiki.