VPS Hosting - Learning resources

Hi there,

I'm looking to move from shared hosting to VPS (linux Apache, Blacknight hosting) but I'm struggling to find some good resources to get up to speed with setting up and quite importantly security.

As, like many people on here I imagine, I don't mind getting my hands dirty and learning some new skills, and I have fairly rudimentary understanding of server setups.

Has anybody got any good recommendations for books / websites to assist someone in the same boat as myself.

 

Ask search engine. How to login via SSH, newbie Linux server admin, example tutorial here
To stay away from command line, order a VPS with hosting control panel. It is just visual interface easy to work with, you dont waste your precious time learning Linux command line.

 

Cheers for the advice postcd - yeah, I imagine there will be a lot of googling involved!

 

What do you need? Is it just s standard Linux, MySQL, Apache, PHP based VPs or you need something specific?

 

My recommendation is for you to download VirtualBox and the OS of your choice and create a virtual machine for you to learn and experiment on. I am assuming that you are running a production website and if so, you probably should not experiment on a production server. For you will run into problems and may screw things up.

As for books, you can check out the LPIC Linux professional certification study guides.

General security guidelines (your VPS host may very well already have basic security setup for you including this): Block everything at the firewall except only the things you need to allow through; choose a very strong password; keep your software updated and check for updates at least once a day, perhaps more often. Other advice is to use SSH keys to access your server instead of a login. But I don't like that myself as you are tied to your local machine.

Find a forum for whichever Linux OS you choose to use (probably CentOS but maybe Ubuntu) and when you have questions, ask there.

https://www.centos.org/forums/
http://ubuntuforums.org/
http://askubuntu.com/

And there are literally hundreds of websites with information about important Linux functions and other tutorials. But as always, the more advanced the information is, the more difficult it is to find. So you will have to scrounge around for information quite a bit.

 

Yeah, I'm just trying to step up from my current shared hosting. Standard stack. Shared hosting isn't offering me enough flexibility with things like caching, SSL certs, SSH access etc ... Taking the step up also has its own pitfalls though, especially with regards to a greater responsibility for security.

Billzo, thanks a lot for the info and advice. I was unaware of the LPIC cert, that maybe a good place to start. Great recommendation with the virtualbox also.

 

Hey @mrmcg It sounds like you definitely need to move over to a LAMP-stack VPS. Where do you want your servers to be located? Feel free to PM me.