Hosting Your Own Ad Server With OpenX (aka OpenAds)

March 5th, 2008 · 16 Comments

OpenX Ad ServerIf you need to serve your own ads or you want to start an serving service, have a look into OpenX, a free open-source ad server.

The project that started as phpAdsNew on SourceForge.net became OpenAds for a couple of years but lately the company has revamped its name and image to become OpenX.

OpenX requires a PHP 4.4+ and MySQL backend.

A Quick & Dirty Guide To Installing OpenX

At the time of this writing, the latest version of OpenX is 2.4.4. You can download OpenX here.

  1. Extract the content from the OpenX archive and upload it to a folder on your server. It is better not to use a directory name like “ads” (ie. http://www.yourdomain.com/ads) since it could be blocked by some ad blocking software. For my part, I use a directory named “ox” (for OpenX of course).
  2. Unless you want to use an existing MySQL database, create a new one.
  3. Point your web browser to htp://www.yourdomain/ox (assuming you’ve created a folder named “ox”).
  4. Click Continue on the welcome screen.
  5. Agree to the licence information and the terms and conditions.
  6. The installer will perform a system check. It is possible that some folder permissions are incorrect. Adjust them if it’s the case.
  7. Enter your database connexion information.
  8. You can leave the database type to MyISAM, it is less resource-consuming than InnoDB.
  9. You can modify the table prefix if you want to but it’s optional. Hit Continue when you’re done.
  10. Set the language and the timezone. You can leave the directories to their default values.
  11. Choose a username and password and set your email address.
  12. You can install the setup default data, we’ll adjust some paramaters later.

That’s pretty much it! You’ve got yourself a brand new ad server.

Now the thing is that using OpenX can be quite confusing at first. Stay tuned as I will post a video on how to use OpenX in a couple of days.

If you like, you can get email notifications.

16 responses so far ↓

1. Response by : Balamurugan on May 15, 2008 at 6:17 am

Hi,
Can you help me how to install this openx server. if you have any document or vidoe it should be very great for us.

Regards
Balamurugan

2. Response by : Stephane Brault on May 15, 2008 at 7:51 am

Hi Balamurugan,

There’s not one single way of installing OpenX. Who are you hosting with? Which control panel do you use?

Give me a little more detail and I’ll try to help you out.

Regards,
Stephane

3. Response by : Balamurugan on May 16, 2008 at 12:02 am

Hi Stephane,

I am using one.com hosting server and same control panel.
I have used the same way of installation which you mentioned above.It shows error message.
Error message: need to increase php memory.
Can you pls give ma idea how to increase php memory.

Regards
Balamurugan

4. Response by : Stephane Brault on May 16, 2008 at 5:15 am

Do you have a php.ini file in your directory?

If so you could change the “memory_limit” parameter to something like this:

memory_limit = 16M

Another option would be to create an .htaccess file at the root of your website and add:

php_value memory_limit 24M

But it’s also possible that One.com doesn’t allow you to modify this setting. If that’s the case, contact One.com and see if they can do it for you. Otherwise, get a hosting account with a provider like HostGator or HostPapa.

5. Response by : Stephane Brault on May 16, 2008 at 10:26 am

I was thinking about offering a full WordPress / OpenX installation for free to those who don’t have a web hosting account yet or to those who need to switch to a new web host.

This would include:

- the latest WordPress release installation
- some of the most popular WordPress plugins
- five (5) SEO’ed WordPress templates (no uniques templates though)
- the latest OpenX release installation
- integration of OpenX invocation code in WordPress templates

Would you be interested?

6. Response by : Insane on Jun 20, 2009 at 6:24 pm

Open X is insanely hard to install and is riddled with bugs. I wouldn’t want to have my entire ad network running on such an unstable and unreliable system.

7. Response by : Stephane Brault on Jun 22, 2009 at 8:22 am

While I gotta admit it does take some knownledge to use OpenX, I can say that it takes me about 5 minutes to install and it isn’t that hard at all.

I’ve been running an OpenX server to serve ads on about 5 websites that gets a total of about 16,000 unique visitors a day. Everything has been running smoothly for the last 3 or 4 years.

8. Response by : Frank on Dec 28, 2009 at 9:50 am

I apologize if this is a dumb question, but I’m wondering if OpenX is a viable alternative to AdSense. I’m interested in showing other business’ ads on my website and in creating new content-specific websites that I can show ads on. Should I consider OpenX over AdSense for any reason? If so, why?

After much looking, I’ve found that this question isn’t answered many places. Maybe it’s because the answer to my question is no, but if it is, I would greatly appreciate your opinion on the matter.

9. Response by : The Web Hosting Hero on Dec 30, 2009 at 12:30 pm

@Frank: OpenX and AdSense are two completely different things.

OpenX is an AdServer you use to manage your banner ads.

AdSense is a program that allows you to earn money on a PPC basis from displaying ads on your website.

That said, you could use OpenX to manage and display AdSense ads for instance.

10. Response by : Ron Tourigny on May 4, 2010 at 11:35 am

Hi,

I have been struggling with the installation of openx for several days and I am hoping that you might be able to get me going in the right direction. I do not have a hosted website. I have created a site on my home computer that I am currently testing on localhost. It uses Apache2.2, PHP 5.3.1, and MySQL 5.1. All of these components are working well together.

11. Response by : Ron Tourigny on May 4, 2010 at 11:45 am

Hi,

I have been struggling with the installation of openx for several days and I am hoping that you might be able to get me going in the right direction. I do not have a hosted website. I have created a site on my home computer that I am currently testing on localhost. I have given myself administrator rights to everything. It uses Apache 2.2, PHP 5.3.1, and MySQL 5.1. All of these components are working well together.

I have downloaded OpenX 2.8.5 into my webserver/apach2.2/htdocs folder and extracted the files. When I type in http://localhost/openx I do not go to an install screen. Instead I go to an index screen with a list of openx files. If I click on index.php, I go to a welcome screen and, after registering and agreeing, it brings me to the database installation screen, but that is as far as it gets. After I fill in the database name of openx, my database username of root (or I also tried root@localhost, and my database password, it gives me the following error after about a minute and that’s all folks. Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks very much!

Ron

MDB2 Error: connect failed
connect: [Error message: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond. ] [Native code: 2002] [Native message: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond. ]
Installation failed to create the database openx

12. Response by : The Web Hosting Hero on May 6, 2010 at 11:19 am

@Ron: first you have to set Apache’s default document in httpd.conf

Look for the DirectoryIndex parameter and add index.php

Restart Apache.

As for the problem with MySQL, have you tried accessing your server using the command line client?

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/administrator/en/mysql-administrator-menus-tools-mysql-command-line-client.html

13. Response by : Ron Tourigny on May 7, 2010 at 10:46 am

Thank you very much for your response.

I guess I am just in a little over my head because when I added index.php to DirectoryIndex and tried to restart Apache I discovered that Apache did not restart. But, I suspect that Apache wasn’t running for a while now and I just didn’t realize it until now.

Prior to trying to install openx (last week) everything was working well, but I have been so focused on getting openx installed, that I do not know at what point I might have lost Apache. In an attempt to get Apache back, I have deleted openx from the htdocs folder but Apache still refuses to start. So, I have some work to do.

As for the MySQL thing – yes I can access it using the command line-client. Of course, when accessing it that way I do not need to enter a username – it just asks for a password (which I know). Checking the “status” I found that the username is root@localhost so that is what I had been using (unsuccessfully) as I tried to install the database with openx. But, until I get Apache running again, I don’t think it will matter too much.

And I was really excited when I saw your response too … I thought for sure I’d get to play with openx today…
I’ll be back to let you know how I make out with the openx installation when I figure out what is going on with Apache. Any suggestions for troubleshooting the Apache problem?

Thanks again – VERY much!
Ron

14. Response by : The Web Hosting Hero on May 7, 2010 at 10:49 am

@Ron: Other than going through the log files (error_log and access_log), I’d say I’m not a very good expert at using Apache on Windows. I’m more a LAMP guy ;)

15. Response by : Ron Tourigny on May 7, 2010 at 10:58 am

For lack of a better idea, I guess I’ll just try re-installing Apache and see what happens.
Thanks for the quick response. Much appreciated.
Ron

16. Response by : Ron Tourigny on May 7, 2010 at 1:29 pm

OK – I’m back. I fixed the Apache problem (apparently when I went into httpd.conf to add index.php I clumsily added part of the word Directory to the top line of the file as I was searching for DirectoryIndex). In any case, that’s fixed – and adding the index.php line DID make the installation open correctly. THANK YOU. So far so good.

But… I still get the same error when I enter the MySQL information. Did my response about using the username root@localhost make sense? Should I be doing something different here?

Again – thanks for any help you can offer.

Ron

Leave a Comment




Posted in Tutorials | 16 Comments

 
 
 
 
 

Tutorials by Category

 
 

Recent Comments

 
© Copyright 2010 - TheWebHostingHero.com