Managing a VPS?

[R D S]

I pay £35 quid per month for web hosting (it's a long story) it's a reseller package so I can have as many domains as i like but there are resource limits (I know!! At that price!)

Plus there are security features (which I understand the need for), eg. I fire up an old computer and there's an email account with an old, incorrect password, if it retries numerous times our IP ends up locked off the server. Or if you are setting up an FTP client and try a few times with a wrong setting. I end up having to call in to get access restored.

So i'm looking into a VPS. I'd be paying less and have more resources and control.

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?

[Theo]

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):

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

[John Rumm]

Its handy to use a company that can provide a decent level of support as well, for times when you do need help.

Much depends on how it has been setup. Chances are that the provider will have made it relatively straight forward with cPanel/webmin or something similar pre-loaded. (or if you are brave SSH so you can command line into a shell :-)

That will depend on what you want to do with it - what things you need to run on the site etc. Usually the basics (web server, MySql/Maria, PHP etc) will likely work out of the box.

(not a terribly helpful answer I realise!)

[R D S]

Thanks for all the info. There's Debian 10 installed. I'd oddly assumed cpanel was open source, not sure where that idea came from. I'm looking at Fasthosts, so security/future shouldn't be a concern. I've a handful of relatively low traffic Opencart installations.

[The Natural Philosopher]

well they are pretty easy if you can manage a linux machine via the command line .

you probably could, if you want to make it insecure as shit

One of the advantages of a VPS is you can use ssh - secure shell.

Happy to help with linux/apache setup, but not cpanel...