Open VZ VPS, CentOS and Virtualmin.

["John Wolgamot" <wolgamot@gmail.com>]

A new guest at the LUCI meeting asked questions about the VPS I use.

I mentioned I would send some links. However I figured the group would get
more out of it if I posted it here instead of emailing it to him personally.

Because of security problems I experienced with shared server CPanel
environments, and the need for root access to make life easier, I realized I
needed a VPS.  After weeks of using "Google" I stumbled onto SPRY
http://www.spry.com/hosting/

After talking to a SPRY rep and upon finding out about the reinstall fee of
an operating system on the VPS if I messed it up he mentioned I should try
VPSLink
http://www.vpslink.com/vps-hosting/
because I could manage the reinstall or changing from one OS to another
myself.

VPSLink is housed in the SPRY datacenter but the support is separate from
SPRY.

I started with one month of Link-4 to get a feel for it then after I
realized I was going have success I upgraded to a year of the Link-5 plan to
get the better monthly fee.

When they upgrade your VPS it happens in an instant even though they are on
different hardware. Link-5 and Link-6 are on higher grade hardware. Faster
drives etc.

SPRY uses Virtuozzo
http://www.swsoft.com/en/virtuozzo/

VPSLink uses OpenVZ
http://openvz.org/

Virtuozzo is based on OpenVZ but has some commercial value added tools for
ISP's to manage it easier.

VPSLink offers several open source and inexpensive CPanel solutions for
managing your VPS and to offer A CPanel to your clients so they can manage
their Virtual Servers housed in your VPS.

I had much experience with webmin and thought it was a great piece of server
management software so.

I chose to manage the VPS with the Virtualmin PRO
www.virtualmin.com
which is the commercial version of the GPL Virtualmin.

I chose this because the pro version has an installer it's inexpensive and
sets up a great server better than I could ever do it.

Virtualmin Pro is the commercial version of the combo GPL Webmin and
Virtualmin but includes what they refer to as ransom-ware. You pay to get
the value added stuff like the installer and lots of extra features many of
which will eventually end up in the GPL version.

I chose also to use CentOS on the VPS. When you tell the server to set
itself up with the OpenVZ panel you wind up with the lightest server install
you ever saw. I had to use up2date to install YUM before I could execute the
virtualmin pro shell script.

I got the Virtualmin pro installer and to my surprise it was a small shell
script that (when executed) downloads, installs and configures absolutely
everything.

Apache PHP MySQL Postfix Mail server, Dovecot secure POP3S IMAPS, SMTPS so
users wont be sending mail passwords in the clear, and much more...

It sets up so much stuff so perfectly you have to wonder if Jamie and Joe
are here from another planet to bestow upon us magical scripts.

I now have 15 virtual servers running under the Link-5 VPS and I'm sure it
could handle more.

The server was up for 165 days but SPRY moved the data center to a newer
facility so my server had to be shut down for 5 hours during the move. :-(



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