How do I put up a simple, static website?

i tried to edit the root line using nano

after editing

i clicked ctrl-x and inputted Y

i got this

**[ Error writing /etc/nginx/sites-available/default: Permission denied ] ** please i need help urgently

Hi @coolinmc6

You’re definitely on the right track! After setting up the DNS records so that your domain points to your Droplet’s IP address, and securing the Droplet (initial server setup), all you need to do is install a webserver and upload the files that it should serve.

The most popular webservers are Apache and Nginx. Nginx performs much better than Apache at serving static files, so I would recommend going with that. Take a look at this tutorial:

• How To Install Nginx on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Once you’ve followed it and installed Nginx, you’ll want to configure it to use a new path for the files. While you can use almost any path you want, I personally prefer /srv/www. Create that directory, and another directory in it for your domain name in order to make it easier to add other websites with different domain names in the future:

sudo mkdir /srv/www /srv/www/colinmc.me

Then, configure nginx to serve files from that directory. Open /etc/nginx/sites-available/default in your favorite text editor and update the line with the root directive such that it looks as follows:

    root /srv/www/colinmc.me;

Restart nginx in order for the changes to take effect:

sudo service nginx restart

Finally, change the directory ownership to your own user so that you can write to it:

sudo chown -R user:user /srv/www

And you’re done! You can now upload your website’s files using FileZilla to /srv/www/colinmc.me, which you should then see at colinmc.me.