Nicole Bluto

I am waiting for my install script to load, so I'm blogging about my experiences with hosting and setting up a VPS.

I have exhausted the resources of shared hosting. I have used several shared hosting companies all with thier plusses and minuses. I started with godaddy.com for just basic websites html/css no scripts just static. They are fine for that. I host all of my domains with godaddy. I Love the DNS manager there. For Drupal, godaddy is a very poor and slow service. One major step up is Hot Drupal. They are AWESOME for small Drupal sites. They are affordable, the customer service is great and Steve is super nice. I recommend them highly for shared hosting for small sites running Drupal. I have NEVER had a problem with them and uptime is excellent and personal service is also way up there.

Lastly, I tried Rackspace CloudSites for my Drupal sites. It worked, but it's still shared hosting and the database clusters do get full so I have gotten error messages "There are no suitable nodes to fulfill your request" and I really don't like that.

Now I am prepared to play with the big dogs. With help from Christefano at Exaltation of Larks and Rain Breaw from Sun Rain Productions, I am setting up my own VPS on Linode. Christefano recomended setting up a Debian 5 server. I trust his judgement and went with that as well.

Here's what I have done so far:

I set up an account on Linode for a Linode 1080. I chose the Debian 5.0 64 bit server with a deployment disk of 48896 MB and a swap disk with 256 MB.

When everything was set up on my dashboard, I clicked on the "boot" button and my linode was running. (hooray)

I floundered a little bit about what to do next. I knew that I wanted to install webmin with these instructions http://webmin.com/vinstall.html but I haven't had to do much SSH and terminal stuff, so I needed a little help to get started with this.

To SSH into your server and install Webmin this is what Christefano said:

To download the install.sh script, you need to log in to the VPS first
using SSH. The way to do this is to open Terminal and enter the
following command:

 ssh root@IPaddress

Replace "IPaddress" with the IP address to your VPS. If this is the
first time you've used SSH to connect to the VPS, you will see a message
in the Terminal like "Are you sure you want to connect to this server?"
and you can type "yes" and then enter your root password.

Once logged in, enter the following commands:

 wget http://software.virtualmin.com/gpl/scripts/install.sh
 chmod +x install.sh
 ./install.sh

It will take a while (maybe up to 15 minutes) to install everything.
When it's done, you can go to https://IPaddress:10000 and log in as root.

So that's where I am. I will update this post as I go.

Update:

When you log in to your webmin for the first time, you will be presented with a wizard. I got instructions from http://joealdeguer.com/technology-projects/34-web-hosting/83-installing-...

Yes - more RAM - Preload Virtualmin Libraries

Yes - more RAM - email

Yes - more RAM - ClamAV

Yes - more RAM - Spamassassin

Yes - more RAM - MySQL

No - PostgreSQL

Set the password for MySQL. This will be the password for the super administrator on MySQL.

Click Re-check and refresh configuration. If an error comes up Virtualmin is not ready for use. Click the link "List of DNS servers" then add the loopback addess 127.0.0.1. Before Clicking Apply Configuration go into the Networking part to make sure the main IP address is set to static IP!

Go back to virtualmin. Recheck configuration again.

I will update if this works out for me.

Update:

So this is working so far. I had to turn of the spam and virus filtering temporarily (in features and plug ins area) because it was causing a problem. It looks like this does not automatically install PHP, so I will update when I figure this part out.

So far, Awesome and Easy.

 

Next, I updated the system realizing I should have done this first.

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade --show-upgraded

I also set up the hostname.

echo "squire" > /etc/hostname
hostname -F /etc/hostname

 

Update: 6/9/10

Not quite done yet.

I didn't have any PHP, so I insalled it using aptitude with this command:

aptitude install php5-mysql php5-dev php5-cli php-apc

[from Christefano]This uses aptitude (an improved package manager) to install the following:

1. the PHP5/MySQL connector, which exposes MySQL to PHP5

2. the PHP5 development tools, which gives you PHP5 development tools in
case you need them to compile PHP extensions in the future

3. the PHP5 command line tool, which makes it possible to run PHP
scripts, including Drush, from the command line

4. the APC opcode cache, which makes PHP code run much, much faster and
with less memory. You'll need this since the VPS currently has barely
enough memory to run the operating system and the Apache/MySQL/PHP stack.

I clicked the create a server button in the virtualmin control panel. I now have a server. Everything ran but the DNS.

I FTP'd into my site using my IP as my host and the username and password I set up for my server when I set it up.

I'm going to edit my php.ini file which is in my /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini from the root and not from your FTP root. You know you are in the wrong place if you don't see the apache directory.

I'm adding these lines to the top:

 extension=apc.so
 apc.enabled=1
 apc.shm_size="64"

 

Christefano suggested that I install some performance related apache modules so I did this command:

a2enmod expires deflate headers

and then a restart with this:

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Then I set the time zone with this command:

dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

choosing "america" and "los Angeles"

There is still more to do, but this is awesome so far.

 

Update 6/11/10

I had to set up a DNS zone in linode in the DNS tab and set my name servers to ns1.linode.com, ns2..., ns3..., ns4... at godaddy in my dns control panel.

 

I set up 3 sub servers and repeated the DNS process above for each.

 

I went to install Open Atrium on my main site and I got an error that I didn't have GD library installed.

ano1 on IRC #drupal-support (i use chatzilla for firefox and #drupal-support is on freenode) helped me by pointing to this tutorial: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/ubuntu-linux-install-or-add-php-gd-support-...

Worked like a charm. Thanks ano1 !

Now I have this error:

Database configuration

Your web server does not appear to support any common database types. Check with your hosting provider to see if they offer any databases that Drupal supports.

That is my next issue. I know I have MySQl installed, so why is it not talking to Drupal?

 

So ano1 rescued me again. Here is the tutorial I followed: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/php-not-connecting-to-a-mysql-database-server/

It works!!!

All in all this took me about a week to accomplish. My next project is Drush. If I get that working, I'll let you know.

:-)

*warning* I do not guarantee that this will work for you and am not responsible if it breaks your system. This is for informational purposes only.