Hosting Your Own Ad Server With OpenX (aka OpenAds)

If 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.

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