Thread: Managing a VPS?
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Theo[_3_] Theo[_3_] is offline
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Default Managing a VPS?

R D S wrote:
Is a VPS within the scope of someone who knows a little or might I find
myself out of my depth.
Do you just stick cpanel on it and as such i'd be pretty much where I am
now, or is there all sorts of background tinkering that i'm unaware of?


Cpanel is a proprietary service so you can't 'just stick it on'. Your VPS
provider might offer that as an additional service. There are frontends
that are free that look a bit like Cpanel (it's been a while since I used
one so I'm not up to date).

For a web server, to DIY you need roughly:

Basic OS install (provided by VPS provider)
Automatic security updates enabled (if not already)
Install web server
Configure TLS certificate (eg Let's Encrypt)
Install whatever PHP/node/Django/etc framework your website might need
Upload is generally better done over SSH/SFTP rather than FTP (which is a
big security pain)

It's mostly command line stuff - there's no GUI for this. DigitalOcean has
some good tutorials on doing this. For example (a bit overkill for your
purposes unless you really need PHP and databases):
https://www.digitalocean.com/communi...n-ubuntu-20-04

It's primarily intended for email but I've used https://mailinabox.email/
which configures everything and also configures a web server. You just run
one script to set it up. There might be something similar aimed at web
servers.

Other things you need to think about:

* Backups. Your VPS provider may offer that as an extra service, or DIY
* Email - does your site use that? It's a bit messy from a VPS for spam
filtering reasons
* Support. You're on your own. If you break it you fix it. There's nobody to
call to get you out of trouble (unless you contract someone else).
* Security. Auto-updates should take care of much of this, but you need to
keep an eye on other things (eg only allow login with SSH keys, make sure
you keep up to date with web packages like Wordpress)
* Resilence. You just have one machine. If it breaks your site goes down.
You might need to set up something to tell you that, and if you need more
robustness you need to build it yourself.
* Scalability. If your site exceeds the requirements of the biggest VPS,
it's up to you to build it to scale out.
* Host quality. Cheap hosts often use less reliable hardware, on less
reliable infrastructure, and they go bust. Obviously less of a problem with
the big ones than those run out of a teenagers bedroom. But again something
you need to manage.

You get complete freedom but complete responsibility too.


What are your actual hosting requirements (space, services, traffic etc)?
It's possible a managed hosting setup at another provider could be more
suitable than complete DIY.

Theo