Web-hosting is getting cheaper and cheaper, to the point where using a VPS (virtual private server) is a more viable option than ever before. The guide I’ll be focusing on in the coming weeks will turn your vanilla VPS hosting plan into a roaring beast.
In a nutshell by the end of this guide your VPS will have the following installed and configured:
- Nginx – Front-end cache. This will make your website blazingly fast, and use far less system resources than a typical web-serving environment
- Apache 2.2 & PHP 5.3 – back-end webserver for producing dynamic content
- Postfix – Sendmail alternative – set up as a SMTP relay through Gmail or another provider
- Monit – to automatically monitor server health and proactively restart services and send alerts if something fails
- Munin – server monitoring software to produce graphs and reports of server health
- Awstats – website statistics package for monitoring
- MySQL – database setup, including replication for automatic backups of databases
- Backups – Using rsync to backup a 1:1 copy of your entire server to an off-site location
- General configuration – grease the cogs, make everything super smooth
Part 1 : Apache & PHP
Without a web-service we can’t really do anything, so lets get something up and running. Get a shell on your VPS and elevate your privileges to root access before performing any of the following:
1) Install EPEL and IUS repos for Yum
These contain extra software packages which we’ll be using throughout the guide. These are for 64-bit CentOS 5, if you are looking for 32-bit change the ‘x86_64′ part of the URL to ‘i386′.
2) Use Yum to install PHP and Apache
Your hosting plan may have already come with installs for these. You can test by doing a ‘yum list installed httpd* php*’ — if you get any results it means you already have packages installed for these. You can either remove using ‘yum remove httpd* php*’ or continue onto Step 4 if you’d just like to configure.
Otherwise lets install Apache and PHP with several popular modules. Obviously if you require different modules you can install to suit – ‘yum list php53u*’ will show all that are available. At the time of writing the version on the IUS repo version for PHP is 5.3.6.
sudo yum install httpd php53u php53u-common php53u-gd php53u-ldap php53u-mcrypt php53u-mysql php53u-pear php53u-xml
3) Fire up Apache and test PHP is running
Believe it or not that’s all you’ll need to do to get a basic web server up and running. You can test everything is working by issuing the following commands:
echo "<?php phpinfo(); ?>" >> /var/www/html/index.php
/etc/init.d/httpd start
Now point a browser at your VPS’ IP address and you should be presented with a PHP info page. I won’t go into the intricacies of configuring Apache, but you can get started by simply placing your website in the /var/www/html/ folder for now. You may wish to remove the /var/www/html/index.php file once you’ve tested, as you generally don’t want the outside world seeing this info.
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