Host Your Own Secure Pastebin with ZeroBin

Productivity Sauce

A webapp for storing text fragments and code snippets can come in handy in many situations, and there are several third-party pastebins at your disposal. But if you prefer to host a pastebin on your own server, ZeroBin is right up your alley. For starters, ZeroBin is rather easy to install. Grab the latest version of the application, extract the download archive, move the resulting directory to the document root of your server, and ZeroBin is ready to go.

Using the application is not particularly difficult either. Paste a text or code fragment, press the Send button, and use the generated URL to share the specific page. For each pasted snippet, you can specify an expiration period and enable comments. The latter feature can be useful when you want not only to share a text fragment or code, but also receive feedback from other users. All the data you send through ZeroBin is compressed and encrypted in the browser before they are pushed to the server using the 256-bit AES encryption. So even if the server is breached or seized, the ZeroBin data will remain safe from prying eyes. Because the URL generated for each pasted snippet contains both a unique identifier and a decryption key, the link is usually very long and practically impossible to remember. Fortunately, ZeroBin features the Shorten URL button which lets you shorten the URL using the SnipURL service.

Despite being at the alpha stage of development, ZeroBin is surprisingly stable and usable, but you should use it with caution anyway.