There is a kick ass program called sshfs. It uses the fuse module to mount a remote directory, via ssh, on the local computer. To begin simply create a folder, on your local computer, that you will use as the mount point of your external directory. Then install sshfs. Debian distributions have it in the repositories: sudo apt-get install sshfs The command is used basically the same way as ssh, and scp. To mount an external directory you can do the following: sshfs user@othermachineip:/directory /home/user/remotedirectory The apache configuration option “documentroot” only can take a local directory as a value. To compensate, you can create a locally mounted remote partition, via sshfs, for use as an apache document root. In this way you will be using one computer as the web server, and a completely separate computer for file storage. Personally, I think this is useful if a web service you offer allows uploads, and you want to have an external location to store them as to not clutter the server hard drive :)