Dedicated Server Setup?
Community Forums/General Help/Dedicated Server Setup?
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| I'm planning on renting a dedicated server at some point in the coming weeks/months. I'm reasonably comfortable administrating a website from CPanel, but I imagine that setting up a dedicated server remotely is an order of magnitude more complicated. Just wondering if anyone could point me to a book or set of tutorials or whatever which would give me insight. I don't want to become an expert. I just want to know enough to set up with rWHM, set up a CPanel, and get a basic site up and running. I have no idea about bandwidth or quotas for CPanel and stuff like that, as I've only ever used shared or VPS. |
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| It greatly depends on where you are getting your server -- some hosting providers still give you your own admin panel where you can add/remove modules through a website somewhere, like cpanel. Others just give you a remote desktop and you're on your own. |
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| I haven't made a final decision on hosting provider. The one I was looking at (Hostgator) says that they provide WHM, and a little light reading told me that this is where you setup CPanel. It's likely that I will be hosting on CentOS, as that seems to be the most common among cheap(ish) servers. Is that enough information? |
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| Before using "cpanel", please make sure it isn't building a bigger security hole than manually administrating the whole thing (check google for cpanel issues). For many subjects you will find adequate help on forums about "root servers". Most of the time the server will just run, you should just take care of updates. Do not install unsecure software (or do it on multiple virtual machines you run on your root). Do not place things like "phpmyadmin" and other things into the public. Do not install things you do not need (mailservers, massive apache modules while you use nginx :D ...). Deactivate FTP etc if not used (or just accept it when running over secured channels). I think nice server distributions ask you many things during installation which will help you setting up a server correctly. If you really intend to use a management console: take care it is not publically available (although password secured). Then limit remote access to eg. your "home" wan ip. Only do things using the ssh/.../etc.-channels. bye Ron |
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| I use [a http://www.linode.com/[/a] Linode -- great guides on setting up from scratch. |
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| Thanks for the information, Derron, but a lot of that went over my head, I'm afraid. I wouldn't be installing the distribution myself. I would be choosing managed hosting and it would already be installed. I have zero experience with Linux so I would be wanting to do everything from WHM and CPanel. I'm confident that I would have many more security holes if I had to manage without CPanel, mind you. Thanks for the alternative suggestion, James. I definitely wouldn't be up to administrating a Linode for myself, but I do like the idea of cloud hosting. It's much cheaper initially while still giving you the option to scale up to a high bandwidth site. Do you know of any server management services which support Linode? I would definitely need to hire someone to manage it for me, and the difference in price over a dedicated server would probably make that viable. |
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