Beginner VPS assistance, please.

[Gazzooks]

Good Day, folks;

I have been using managed shared web hosting for years and I am able to navigate the steps required to host any number of websites from one hoster.

I still have my managed shared web hosting, I have just purchased VPS hosting with Hostinger and am trying to transition to VPS Hosting.

I am looking for a good Course that explains the following:

• from A to Z to setting up the base of the VPS,
• the steps required to secure the server,
• and the process of setting up the server to host many websites (Node.js architecture),
• also the possibility of creating my own mail server.

Please post your comments here or you can DM me if you want to be private about it.

Thank you for your continued knowledge sharing with the community.

 

[LuvUAE]

Good Day, folks;

I have been using managed shared web hosting for years and I am able to navigate the steps required to host any number of websites from one hoster.

I still have my managed shared web hosting, I have just purchased VPS hosting and am trying to transition to VPS Hosting.

I am looking for a good Course that explains the following:

• from A to Z to setting up the base of the VPS,
• the steps required to secure the server,
• and the process of setting up the server to host many websites (Node.js architecture),
• also the possibility of creating my own mail server.

Please post your comments here or you can DM me if you want to be private about it.

Thank you for your continued knowledge sharing with the community.

First of all ..take all backups regarding website - website content and database

Then Install Control Panel on ur newly purchased VPS. Control Panels in market - Cpanel (user-friendly n reliable), CyberPanel(with Litespeed Enterprise), aaPanel(user-friendly) etc

After successful installation.

...

 

[Gazzooks]

First of all ..take all backups regarding website - website content and database

Then Install Control Panel on ur newly purchased VPS. Control Panels in market - Cpanel (user-friendly n reliable), CyberPanel(with Litespeed Enterprise), aaPanel(user-friendly) etc

After successful installation.

...

Nothing on the VPS atm, it's brand new. I did install Centros and installed the recommended control panel for that os. but nothing else.

 

[Auwal]

Nothing on the VPS atm, it's brand new. I did install Centros and installed the recommended control panel for that os. but nothing else.

Use aapanel on your VPS, it's a free for Lifetime

 

[Gazzooks]

Use aapanel on your VPS, it's a free for Lifetime

Right on. Well in playing around in there, I removed Centos OS and the control panel.

I installed just the Ubuntu OS and manually doing everything thus far.

When I did that I couldn't log in (BUT I can now) I had to remove the contents of the known ssh keys. Fine now.

Just Update and Upgraded the OS. so ready to go with the setup.

 

[Gazzooks]

Well, I've located some fantastic courses on this subject and related subjects from this UDemy Author:

https://www.udemy.com/user/youaccel/

Not promoting, but rather recommending to others with similar questions that I had

 

[guguk]

You can use centos as well but CWP (probably you have installed before) not stable and it's consuming a lot of source of the server. All managed hosting provider uses some "defined" script for "mailing" "security" etc. And most of them you can find "free alternative" or if you want you can buy too. Just be careful that you need to install scripts which only you need. I'm using reseller hosting with directadmin and I'm very happy with that for now and if you were used cpanel before your managed hosting you can migrate to directadmin easily and it's very cheap rather than cpanel

 

[Gazzooks]

Currently, I have the VPS root setup with Apache, Nginx, PHP, and PHPMyAdmin. Now I am starting to add the different Domains to be served. Once I finish that, I'll look into adding my mail server.

 

[guguk]

Currently, I have the VPS root setup with Apache, Nginx, PHP, and PHPMyAdmin. Now I am starting to add the different Domains to be served. Once I finish that, I'll look into adding my mail server.

You can install LAMP with root OR
just decide which panel you supposed to use and install through with it.

 

[Groot]

These courses ready shared, just search on net:
For WordPress or PHP on VPS:

https://www.udemy.com/course/the-perfect-nginx-server-ubuntu-2204-edition/

For NodeJS:

Deploy React NodeJS app on VPS with Ubuntu 20.04

Many developers have been turning to Virtual Private Servers to host their projects, and with good reason: unlike in a shared hosting environment, you are not running the risk of someone else's badly written code resulting in poor performance or (worse yet) your site being compromised because of...

www.tutorialspoint.com

 

[Gazzooks]

These courses ready shared, just search on net:

Perfect share, ty for your recommendations

*Edit* Grabbing them now. cheers

 

[alexhost]

Good Day, folks;

I have been using managed shared web hosting for years and I am able to navigate the steps required to host any number of websites from one hoster.

I still have my managed shared web hosting, I have just purchased VPS hosting with Hostinger and am trying to transition to VPS Hosting.

I am looking for a good Course that explains the following:

• from A to Z to setting up the base of the VPS,
• the steps required to secure the server,
• and the process of setting up the server to host many websites (Node.js architecture),
• also the possibility of creating my own mail server.

Please post your comments here or you can DM me if you want to be private about it.

Thank you for your continued knowledge sharing with the community.

Your best way Youtube or course in Udemy.

Install a free control panel like Cloudpanel, fastpanel or Keyhelp control panel and you are ready to go.
No one will teach you that in this post, that is a lot of content...

Use a VPS and do training instead switch to vps without training a little. VPS isn't hard.

Cheers

 

[Gazzooks]

Use a VPS and do training instead switch to vps without training a little. VPS isn't hard.

Cheers

Agreed. In my original post, I asked for recommendations for courses about this subject. Yes, there is a lot of information to learn about this subject matter. This thread ended up being a conversation and answering my noob questions as I went along.

I have spent the better part of two days now learning a ton of information, I have rebuilt the VPS about 4 times now, all from scratch, to better learn the different ways to accomplish that.

In the end, setting up a VPS is all predicated on your end goal for the type of applications that you want to server from it.

At the moment, I think I would like to set up the VPS to host all manner of frameworks. A MySql Database, to provide data storage to - Php, Laravel, Django, Node.js, etc. I am working on figuring out how to accomplish the best way. Possibly apach2 / nginx with the applications in their own directories accessed by their domain names.

I do appreciate all responses, so thank you for that.​

 

[Gazzooks]

News Update:

VPS is up and running with Ubuntu 22.04, Lamp stack is all set up. Each component was installed and configured manually. Had a bit of a hiccup with securing the MySQL server for authentication, nothing a Google search couldn't help with. Also added SSL certificates for all my other domains under the main domain.

In the past three days, I have learned a fantastic amount of information on Setting up a VPS (Manually). I could have picked a premade setup from my hoster, but the main issue there was that they were or are using Ubuntu 16.08 or something similar. I really wanted the latest Ubuntu 22.04 and its security enhancements.

My next part of this journey is setting up a mail server on Ubuntu 22.04.

Then the last part of my journey is figuring out how to set up the server to serve MERN applications. Or better yet if I CAN or NOT.

Thanks for everyone listening and commenting with your suggestions and or recommendations.

 

[dieselbaby]

There isn't much difference between Ubuntu 22.04 and 20.04 - the reason why hosts support 20.04 is because it is an LTS release which means that it is more stable.

As for setting up a mail server, that's something that you of course *can* do, but honestly, most people who have done it will probably agree with me in saying that it is ultimately a waste of your time -- for many reasons. Your server's IP address will be included in a ton of blacklists/blocklists and your mail deliverability will be pretty garbage compared to if you are using an external SMTP gateway or mail provider which I would recommend doing highly.

Most important things you can do for setting up your server is to keep it secure. If you are watching your logs then you already see how many attacks your server is getting just from being online, you should be seeing thousands of them every few days. Here is a screenshot showing how many attempted attacks I have gotten on just one of my servers which only hosts one (inactive) website over the last month -- and these are just the ones which have done enough repeated attempts to be autoblocked by my firewall software:



On my servers with actual websites that get a decent amount of traffic, it's like 10x as many.

For security, at a minimum you should be doing the following:

• change SSH port to a non-standard one
• get rid of root login, create another user account and add it to your wheel group/sudoers
• remove password-based login in your `/etc/ssh/sshd_config.conf` file

 

[Gazzooks]

There isn't much difference between Ubuntu 22.04 and 20.04 - the reason why hosts support 20.04 is because it is an LTS release which means that it is more stable.

As for setting up a mail server, that's something that you of course *can* do, but honestly, most people who have done it will probably agree with me in saying that it is ultimately a waste of your time -- for many reasons. Your server's IP address will be included in a ton of blacklists/blocklists and your mail deliverability will be pretty garbage compared to if you are using an external SMTP gateway or mail provider which I would recommend doing highly.

Most important things you can do for setting up your server is to keep it secure. If you are watching your logs then you already see how many attacks your server is getting just from being online, you should be seeing thousands of them every few days. Here is a screenshot showing how many attempted attacks I have gotten on just one of my servers which only hosts one (inactive) website over the last month -- and these are just the ones which have done enough repeated attempts to be autoblocked by my firewall software:

For security, at a minimum you should be doing the following:

• change SSH port to a non-standard one
• get rid of root login, create another user account and add it to your wheel group/sudoers
• remove password-based login in your `/etc/ssh/sshd_config.conf` file

I thought Ubuntu 22.04 was LTS too?



All excellent points ty. Most of these I did not know about. But I did try to harden my server though.

The last three points I will research, ty for these.

 

[daffanra]

what panel did u use now? cause i use cpanel and very expensive for me

 

[Gazzooks]

what panel did u use now? cause i use cpanel and very expensive for me

Hi;
I haven't really decided yet, been trying different ones (CPanel not being one of them). Currently, I am riding Virtualmin, I am just learning how to use it really.

I am wondering what others are using as well. Most are Paid to get the full benefits from them.

Any thoughts from others?

 

[daffanra]

I have plans move to direct admin but now I still love cpanel, i use since 2017 ((

 

[Tuton]

Get a droplet from DigitalOcean combine it with hestia panel add Cloudflare and you have a nice setup and easy to scale up anytime.