Virtual Private Server as Intranet host

Question

Is it possible to use a Virtual Private Server to host an intranet and connect to it via the hosts file on your computer?

Thanks in advance, Francis

Answer 1

I have the impression that those two things are mutually exclusive. An intranet is a local network implementing Internet technologies, a VPS is a virtualised server made available by a 3rd party over the internet.

Do you mean host an Intranet site locally on a virtual machine? Or perhaps use a VPN to place a remote VPS on the same address space as your intranet?

In either case the answer is yes. For the later you'd need something like OpenVPN or ssh (pointopoint link) connecting the VPS to your network. Once it has an IP in that address space you could use the hosts file to map that to a resolvable name, but it'd be a poor solution seeing as now you have to maintain a hosts file per client machine.