Hosting Your Own Ad Server With OpenX (aka OpenAds)

March 5th, 2008 · 9 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.

9 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.

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