I've been in shared hosting for the past 4 years or so. Thanks to a great offer here at DP, and Dreamhost's poor reliability, I've finally purchased a VPS at LiquidWeb and I've spent the day getting the thing running a few of my sites. I'm going to use this thread as a way of helping others that may be transitioning from Shared Hosting (aka Dreamhost) to a VPS solution. I found these little things lacking in Liquid Web's Knowledgebase, BUT Liquid Web's support has been amazing. These guys have helped with everything over the phone and every single tech (3 uniques in one day) have helped above and beyond the call of duty and, more importantly, they've been respectful of my Shared Hosting mentality. I'm a believer and I'm so glad I picked these guys as my VPS host. By the way, if you're on Dreamhost or some other shared hosting, you will not believe the increase in speed and response once your site is set up on a VPS. Friggin' fast! Enough....here's what I've learned so far. Setting Up Accounts and Domains In shared hosts, you get one cPanel account with unlimited domains. A person gets used to logging in with the same account to set up and manage unlimited domains. In a VPS, you get one server (WHM), with unlimited cPanel accounts that can have unlimited domains. My mistake. I automatically set up one account and started creating a bunch of addon domains under that account. LiquidWeb was quick to correct me. Create one account per domain. Sure it's more usernames and passwords, but you'll be more secure and issues related to a single domain will be easier to troubleshoot. Specifically, create one account and keep one domain per account. Group Permissions in Joomla and Wordpress When you download files from Dreamhost via FTP and then upload to LiquidWeb via FTP, CHMOD permissions will be fine, but Group permissions may get screwy. Basically, your Joomla site will work fine, but the configuration.php and cache folders will still appear unwriteable despite being CHMOD 755. Solution: You will need to change the group permission to 'nobody' for the file/folders you need writeable. Below is the SSH command you'll need to perform: cd /home/your_account/public_html chown your_account:nobody cache configuration.php chmod g+w cache configuration.php Code (markup): If anyone else has VPS Tips for me, please chime in! Thanks.
I found more problems when trying to setup Joomla in LiquidWeb. More permission issues. To be precise, I was unable to upload images in the backend using Media Manager. Here's the SSH commands I used to get all the directories setup correctly. Just cut n paste into Putty while logged into SSH. I was logged in as root. chgrp nobody administrator/backups chgrp nobody administrator/components chgrp nobody administrator/modules chgrp nobody administrator/templates chgrp nobody cache chgrp nobody components chgrp nobody images chgrp nobody images/banners chgrp nobody images/stories chgrp nobody language chgrp nobody mambots chgrp nobody mambots/content chgrp nobody mambots/editors chgrp nobody mambots/editors-xtd chgrp nobody mambots/search chgrp nobody mambots/system chgrp nobody media chgrp nobody modules chgrp nobody templates chmod g+w administrator/backups chmod g+w administrator/components chmod g+w administrator/modules chmod g+w administrator/templates chmod g+w cache chmod g+w components chmod g+w images chmod g+w images/banners chmod g+w images/stories chmod g+w language chmod g+w mambots chmod g+w mambots/content chmod g+w mambots/editors chmod g+w mambots/editors-xtd chmod g+w mambots/search chmod g+w mambots/system chmod g+w media chmod g+w modules chmod g+w templates Code (markup):
Mostly, it seems Joomla needs PHP safe_mode OFF. Have you tried that? What error message do you have?
Thanks for the tips bluesquare. I think im going to go for liquidweb for my VPS as they look great. Wouldn't it have been easier to use fantastico to install wordpress and joomla?