Since this wasn’t as trivial as I’d wished to setup I decided to explain the setup.
1st: Grab a VPS. Head over to Digital Ocean they’re a big player in this area I use Linode personally, you could even get a free one from AWS. Bonus points if you pay with Bitcoin to stay anonymous! This way you’ll have a personal machine in the cloud that’s ssh available to you over the internet. Even if you aren’t hosting you ordering a domain as a pentester you need a VPS. They’re dirt cheap
linode homepage
digital ocean homepage
I slapped Debian 8 on it (no Kali instance no worries on that). Instance spun up and running in less than 5 minutes. Did the normal of setting up a firewall, regenerating ssh keys, updating packages and such.They have script to import the top kali tools for Debian and Ubuntu. Just a matter of adding a repository and apt-get update
2nd: Setting up the LAMP stack. This was pretty easy for anyone remotely comfortable working in the terminal. Not to mention standard builds have all of this installed by default.
apt-get install php-7.0
apt-get install mysql
apt-get install apache2
3rd: At this point you could setup WordPress. installing wordpress on lamp ubuntu
Now you need a domain. Head over to goDaddy and purchase one. Again they’re cheap. Setting up the DNS is very simple and required logging in to your VPS provider and pointing the domain at your VPS’s nameservers. It takes a few minutes to propagate. Eventually you’ll have you domain address accessible.
4th: Since I rather not pay for things I signed up for Cloudflare account. They provide a pretty awesome service. Mainly the free SSL cert. Along with that you get free analytics on your site, a waf, and a host of other things. This required updating nameserver in VPN to Cloudflare’s. Their service intrigued me, here’s how it works. Once the DNS updates they now sever your site, so when a user request it, their computer first make the DNS request and the nearest Cloudfare DNS server (next to the requestor) answers and responds with IP of itself instead of your domain IP. After that resolution the client then fetches all the content from Cloudflare data center and the data center caches most of the content intelligently and only contacts the domain for dynamic content. I thought this was impressive because they can server your site magnitudes faster to a client sitting in-front of your site than you can directly serving it to the client. LOL! I gotta dig into this some more.
You sit back smelling the aroma of having your own authentic blog being served over SSL behind a WAF. Life’s good.
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