im planning on moving servers from the US to the UK to increase the speed of the site for most people as some people are experiencing slow loading times (particularly my own University computers which for some reason take ages to load the site), and I have found what seems to be the perfect host - uk2.net (They are cheaper and seem to offer exactly what I want). I am only hosting the one website at the moment so the server control panel I use isn't really too importnat, although this is the mistake I had before when I chose to go with Plesk - I hate Plesk and after using cPanel it doesn't really have the power I want in a control panel. The host I'm going with offers Webmin or BlueQuartz for no additional costs... Which of the two is more powerful? I am more interested in which one has good FTP user account control. Also: The OS. uk2 offer "CentOS 4.x, Debian 3.x, RedHat Fedora 4.x, Slackware 10.x" ... I'm used to freeBSD at the moment so I guess all of these OSs will be quite new to me... Bearing in mind I am planning to only run one website on the server, which OS will be the fastest to use? Are there any other implications for me to consider when transferring servers? A small portion of my code refers the base directory so I understand that I'll have to change that but the earlier I get the server, the more time I will have to change all of this. I really dont like the way Plesk over-rides a lot of what I do on my server, does anybody know if the mentioned control panels do the same? One last thing, has anybody had any past experience with uk2? The people I'm with at the moment are very rude and didn't even install php5 when they setup the server, and now ask for more money to upgrade it (Plesk over-rides me personally updating to php5, its rubbish)
As for the control panel, I've never used Webmin before, but I've never even heard of BlueQuartz. I'd go with Webmin, but cPanel is an option, I'd go with that. As for the OS, RH would be best. CentOS being second and FC4 being third. I don't have any experience with the other OSs. When transferring, make sure you backup your whole site. I have no experience with Plesk. If their support staff was rude, then I'd rather not go with them. Installing PHP5 costs extra? Thats ridiculous imo.
Hi, I would recommend cpanel as control panel....and and yep CENT OS is best.It's not hard to learn just use it 1 month...you'll learn it.Charging for installing PHP5 is complete ripp off IMHO.You can compile php5 yourself.. Saad
saad - i tried compiling php5 myself, and it seems that was done successfully, however phpinfo() claims differently... i believe this is related to cpanel over-riding something/everthing or other. The biggest problem I have with php4 (AND a non-up-to-date version of gdimage) is that php5 has a lot of functions I will find useful especially image manipulation - which is extremely annoying as I have an image-related site. regarding cpanel... i am asking myself whether or not i really need cpanel for £15/$30 extra per month when I will hardly use it (Its one website). All I really need a control panel for is to assign photographers of mine their own FTP access. I like to do everything else in the shell anyway.
Webmin is study and well devlped software, and will give you a decent amount of control, however if you only have one site on the server and are after saving every single resource for that, I'd havva look at slimftpd- it has a php front end for user management, that way you could scrap a panel all together and just install phpmyadmin and apache + mysql + php + whatever else <-- sounds a lot but in the long run may be well worth it. CentOS is definately the way to go the rest are far too bloated in my opinion.
After reading your post, I'm pretty certain you'd benefit from no control panel software at all, start with a fresh install of CentOS and install everything from source if php5 is all it's got it cannot get it wrong....