Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!

Sign In Register

Quick Links


Categories

In this Discussion

› › VPS From Scratch!!!
New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.

All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.

VPS From Scratch!!!

DeanTheHatDeanTheHat Member
edited October 2011 in Help

Hi everyone. I have been looking through a few sites, including lowendbox, for the past couple of weeks now. Lowendbox seems to have the most balanced vievs, reviews, comments and advice on everything to do with VPS.

I am in the web development business and supply hosting to a few clients. I love getting stuck in to everything i am involved in and i would love to know more about sourcing, setting up and managing my own VPS.

The extent of my expertise on servers is installing apahe and mysql on my testing servers. Mind you, i loved doing that and have always wanted to know more about properly setting up and managing a server.

So, lets go right back to square one and start from scratch. I have very little knowledge about VPS. I am based in the UK as are most of my clients. I want to buy a VPS and set it up for php/mysql, ruby & rails, perl, email, etc. I want to set it up securely. I want to be able to install modules and extensions like imagemagick and phpexpress. My aim is to host my own and my clients sites on it. I want a good control panel and reseller control panel. I want everything that i install and use to be absolutely free while i am learning. After all, no point in paying cpanel/whm and other license fees if i am not going to be getting full use of them!

Who is going to start the ball rolling. Where do i start?

Comments

  • LongShotLongShot Member
    edited October 2011

    Where do i start?

    http://library.linode.com/

    Linode.com is a premium VPS provider.

    Thanked by 2yomero DeanTheHat
  • DeanTheHatDeanTheHat Member

    my sites and most of my clients sites are aimed at people in the UK. Should i get a vps in the UK or does this matter? Would france, netherlands or germany be options?

  • LongShotLongShot Member
    edited October 2011

    Should i get a vps in the UK or does this matter?

    It's usually best to have a server as close as possible to your clients, i.e., the UK. This reduces the time your server needs to communicate with a client. You can measure this time using the "ping" function in Windows or Linux to contact a test IP address offered by the provider. However, any advantage from being close to your server can be lost if the VPS provider's server is underpowered or overwhelmed, and is slow to process requests. Therefore, it may be better to go with a more capable and reputable provider that is a little farther away.

    Thanked by 1DeanTheHat
  • kiloservekiloserve Member

    DeanTheHat said: want to set it up securely. I want to be able to install modules and extensions like imagemagick and phpexpress. My aim is to host my own and my clients sites on it. I want a good control panel and reseller control panel.

    To be honest, it's easiest to install something like DirectAdmin, cPanel/Kloxo.

    Sure you can install things yourself and provide hosting but it's a real pain for hundreds of sites. Doing the manual config for your own sites is easy and great but when you do it for alot of sites, it's quite a task.

    I think even most of the "Pros" would use a Control panel when dealing with client site hosting.

    If you want the challenge, you can install cPanel and then upgrade it to NGINX.

    Thanked by 1DeanTheHat
  • MrAndroidMrAndroid Member

    If you're customers are mainly in the UK, then any country in Western Europe will do for housing your sites. The ping difference between UK and France is usually around 2ms.

    Thanked by 1DeanTheHat
  • DeanTheHatDeanTheHat Member

    is there any need for more than one vps for hosting? When pointing nameservers there is usually two ipv4 IPs - does this mean i should have two vps set up?

  • tuxtux Member

    DeanTheHat said: When pointing nameservers there is usually two ipv4 IPs - does this mean i should have two vps set up?

    Yes, two or more.

    Thanked by 1DeanTheHat
  • DeanTheHatDeanTheHat Member

    Thanks, Tux. Is the benefit of having more than one IP only for back up reasons? Or does this give more than one place to retrieve web pages? For example, if i set up 3 vps=3 nameservers, do they share the responsibility for handling visitors?

    Also, should all the servers be set up EXACTLY the same way?

  • DeanTheHatDeanTheHat Member

    By the way, thanks to everyone who has been giving me advice. It has all been very helpful.

  • yomeroyomero Member

    Yes, backup reasons mainly.

    But having multiple IPs in the same server is for SSL reasons.

  • kiloservekiloserve Member
    edited October 2011

    DeanTheHat said: For example, if i set up 3 vps=3 nameservers, do they share the responsibility for handling visitors?

    Generally, a setup of 3 servers would be delegated responsibilities, you can use 2 cheap VPS for DNS and 1 good one for webservices.

    My recommendation if you will be using this for general webhosting

    Server 1 - DNS Only (cPanel has a DNS Only version that's free if you use main cPanel)
Server 2 - DNS Only (try to get in a different geographical location from Server 1)
Server 3 - cPanel (This server should be strong as it will handle the visitors)

    You could do with just Server 3 if you wanted but having DNS on the same server is generally looked down upon due to redundancy reasons.

  • FatboyFatboy Member

    If you are looking to save a few quid on the control panel look at Directadmin - something like $5 a month for a VPS, not as popular as cPanel but about third of the price! (in my opinion DA is better as well ;))

    As for location if you are mainly UK focused, UK is the best bet but to get a little more for your money look at the Netherlands or Germany. I have used those countries in the past and the latency is next to nothing. In fact, at one point I was getting a better ping to the German server than I was to the UK one. However, don't base latency on a ping - some providers won't give priority to pings in their traffic shaping etc so if there is a lot of traffic and you send a ping, it gets dropped down the list so to say.

  • sleddogsleddog Member

    First off I second LongShot's recommendation of Linode. If you want a VPS for hosting client websites in a production environment then you won't find much better.

    But there are KVM hosts that advertise here which are damn good, notably Hostigation and Bitcable. I use both at present and they are truly excellent. But I have a multi-year history of satisfaction with Linode so that's why it's my top recommendation at this time :)

    The control panel you use depends on two things (IMO): (1) your level of expertise, (2) what you want to deploy to your clients. If you're strong with all aspects of configuration and want to fully-manage your clients, then you don't need a control panel at all. Otherwise you need to evaluate the available panels and decide your route based on those two criteria.

    For DNS, I'd recommend that you get it off the VPS entirely. Host it independently with a service like DNSmadeEasy.com. When you're client base grows to a certain level, and your management skills grow with experience, you can look at deploying your own redundant DNS servers.

  • LongShotLongShot Member

    @sleddog: First off I second LongShot's recommendation of Linode.

    I want to clarify that I was recommending Linode's excellent library at http://library.linode.com as a resource rather than endorsing Linode itself.

    You are correct, though, that a reliable production site is vital. I'd be paying $20-plus each month to Linode or another premium provider if my livelihood depended on it.

  • dracodraco Member

    kiloserve said: You could do with just Server 3 if you wanted but having DNS on the same server is generally looked down upon due to redundancy reasons.

    Just curious. If everything is running on Server 3 and the server is down versus Server 1/2/3 and Server 3 is down leading the traffic from 1/2 to a dead end, what's the difference?

  • kiloservekiloserve Member
    edited October 2011

    draco said: Just curious. If everything is running on Server 3 and the server is down versus Server 1/2/3 and Server 3 is down leading the traffic from 1/2 to a dead end, what's the difference?

    There are a few differences and some advantages of splitting up your DNS from your webserver.

    1) If mail is hosted elsewhere, such as Google apps, mail will still be delivered even if the webserver #3 is down.

    2) With a catastrophic failure of Server 3, if DNS is still running on Server 1 or 2, you can still re-route your visitors temporarily to another server while you rebuild your webserver.

  • kristalkristal Banned

    u can also replace init with minit or ninit for additional 0,5-0,7 mb savings :)

  • cripperzcripperz Member

    If you are looking at hosting clients in your vps, definitely having a panel is gonna save you alot of time configuring and setting up existing and future clients. I personally prefer Virtualmin to manage my clients and server all in one panel. Installation script have also improved for Virtualmin and the community is very active. Below are the few panels base on personal opinions / experience. Just sharing the opensource ones:

    Virtualmin GPL with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 32bit - if you are going to use this, there is a few tweaks that can help you save up the ram usage. Try not to pre-load libraries and switch off those daemons that you dont intend to use like subversions, awstat / webalizer, etc. You can run this well under 64Mb on a lowendbox with basic features like apache2.2, php 5.3.2, ftpd and email. Both web hosting controls and server administration (webmin) in control panel - http://software.virtualmin.com/gpl/scripts/install.sh

    Kloxo Host In A Box Panel - I notice there is another favourite opensource panel around too. Like Kloxo HITB (they have Openvz templates). But i cant say much about this as i have not really used it thoroughly. Maybe someone else might wanna share their experience on this one. - http://lxcenter.org/software/kloxo/

    ISPConfig 3 - I have personally used this to host free users. Not too bad, very good community support in forums, well documented but setting up might be a pain for those who are not yet familiar. Solely web hosting related controls in panel. Falko is helpful guy there too. http://www.ispconfig.org

Sign In or Register to comment.