• Setting Up a VPS for WordPress Without an Ounce of Linux Knowledge

    I’ve been seeing this types of questions a lot in WHT. People who outgrew their shared hosting plans but not sure of upgrading to VPS or dedicated server because they’re not technical enough.

    Usually the advice they got is to go for a managed provider, which is of course, a great option, especially if you have more money than time.

    But this guide is for people who wants to squeeze what little money they can save by going with self-managed providers.

    And don’t want to deal with command line. And, don’t want to pay for a cPanel license. Or bother to learn about free, open source panel like webmin.

    Here We Go

    So, you’ve got your VPS. It’s nice. It’s got 2GB RAM, a dedicated CPU core, and a nice flashy SSD. Raw-performance wise, it’s probably four times better than what you’ll get from a shared hosting plan.

    What do you do, then? You’ve never dealt with a command line before. You don’t know the difference between nginx, apache or what version of PHP to use.

    And you don’t need the server for fancy, django powered Node.JS behemoth of an app. You just want to run a wordpress site (or several).

    Well, have you met Server Pilot before?

    Now, Server Pilot advertised themselves as a companion to a Digital Ocean droplets. I’m not sure if that is an attempt to get an acquisition offer but it will 100% work with other VPS providers as well. I’ve tested it.

    In fact, i’ve tested it running a wordpress site on a 256MB RAM KVM from Virmach, and their default setup seems optimized enough to run it fine. You need to run Ubuntu in the VPS to use Server Pilot

    So, here’s their pricing:

    As you can see, even on their free plan, you can use them to run unlimited websites on unlimited amount of servers. That also includes basic firewall configuration so you should be fine running on their default setup without having to worry about basic skiddy attack that can happen when you run a VPS without a properly-configured firewall.

    So. I hope by now you’ve decided to sign up, and once you signed up, you’ll be greeted with this screen:

    Easy enough. Click Connect to Server, and you’ll get this screen:

    Now, when you buy your VPS from any provider, you will get root account details from them, usually in the welcome email. Just take the root password, and paste it there.

    For SFTP password, use a secure one. You’ll need it for when you want to upload files or migrate your site to the server administered by Server Pilot. The username for this SFTP account would be ‘serverpilot’.

    SFTP, short for SSH File Transfer Protocol, is completely different from FTP (File Transfer Protocol). When you’re running SFTP, you’re transferring files across SSH, a much more secure and encrypted data stream. Using SFTP also means that the server doesn’t have to run a separate service for FTP, which might save a bit of resources and less protocols to worry securing about.

    Now, click ‘Connect to ServerPilot’, and ServerPilot will start setting up the server for you.

    Once it’s done, you should see a screen that basically told you to “create an app”. An app can mean anything that requires PHP and MySQL, but in the case of wordpress, they have a special option for it that makes it even easier to set up.

    Tick that ‘wordpress’ option, and the rest is pretty much self-explanatory. After you’re done, remember to create an A record for your domain and point it to the IP Address of the server that’s being managed by Server Pilot. In most cases, you should see your new wordpress site up and available within minutes, but DNS propagation can take up to 24 hours, so be patient.

    And That’s It! Enjoy!

    P.S: If you need a self-managed VPS to run a WordPress on Server Pilot, why not try us at GOODHost? Our plans for 1GB RAM starts only at $6.99/month and it runs wordpress beautifully. This blog, for example, is hosted on our VPS. 🙂

  • On ‘Kodi Fully Loaded’ and Beautiful Interface to Piracy

    That’s some odd title, i know, but i’m talking about the case of some android tv box sellers on Ebay that sells them with HTPC software Kodi, fully loaded with addons that facilitates watching pirated movies and tv series. There’s now a case of them being arrested in the UK.

    From torrentfreak:

    Police have arrested five people on suspicion of selling ‘pirate’ set-top boxes configured to receive pay TV. The Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit teamed up with FACT, Sky, Virgin, BT, and The Premier League to arrest the sellers, who allegedly supplied Kodi with unlicensed addons.

    To me, Kodi Fully Loaded is just another symptoms of the growingly easy to use and beautiful interface to piracy. My dad, a 60 year old man, for example, seem to watch movie everyday, without realizing that the site where he’s watching them from is actually an illegitimate pirate site. But it’s designed in such a way that barrier to the content is so low that average people who’s not aware of technology will not realized that he or she is doing something illegal.

    In fact, some of those movie streaming sites tend to have names that end in “flix”, or “theater”, that makes people think that this is legit movie streaming site. And if it’s not legit, how wrong could watching a movie by just clicking a single buton really be?

    From my experience with Kodi, the availability of addons for streaming movies, tv series, sports streams and other media content fetch from the internet is pretty impressive. By just buying a $35 box and loading it up with Kodi, it feels like you’re paying $100+ to your cable company. But with kodi, you’ll only need to pay once.

    I can see why the copyright holders are becoming increasingly worried about this issue, but i’m afraid this is just a sign of what piracy will turned into in the coming years. The days of messing with torrent clients, finding legit torrents that are not bundled with virus, getting letters from your ISP, etc. In the future it will be a simple click. The answer is not to arrest everybody, but to lower the barrier to content even more.

    If copyright holders still act greedy and kept trying to get more money from content by means of geoblocking, pulling content from Netflix and putting them in another paid service, etc, this will only get worse.

  • There’s a Demand for a Good Shared Hosting Panel & Billing Software but There’s So Little Choice

    There’s simply too small of choices for web hosting providers on off-the-shelf panel and billing platform to use.

    I really don’t understand why that is. There’s so many choice in the market for open source CMS, or other 3rd party software for sysadmin. But for off-the-shelf hosting panel and billing platform, cPanel seem to have a tight grasp on the market.

    Open source website control panel like Webmin, Vesta or Ajenti V are available, but simply not good enough for commercial adoption or even average people with a VPS to use. They’re just too hard to use. For billing platform, WHMCS, especially after they got acquired by cPanel, now seem destined to be the number one choice for years to come.

    Boxbilling, the one viable open source competitor to WHMCS, seem to be somewhat abandoned. Github issues are not being looked at, and my last experience using them for GOODHost just ends in weird bug that seem to have no resolution. So we decided to migrate back to WHMCS.

    The funny part is they seem to have abandoned support for the pro version as well.

    I wonder if this is because the only ones who use off-the-self software, especially free ones, are kiddie host with a reseller hosting plan. And yet even though that might be true, having only one truly viable product for hosting providers that don’t have the resource to develop their own panel, is not a good look for this industry.

    Competition is always good, and i’m afraid if cPanel and WHMCS became the industry standard, there will be no true innovation in the shared hosting space because we’re inherently tied to cPanel’s development cycles and their closed-source codebase.

    I don’t know, maybe this post is just 10 years too late and there’s simply no need for innovation in the shared hosting space. Unlimited everything is the last innovation this industry will ever made for years to come. Maybe containerized hosting is truly the future.

    Looking at the amount of people that don’t know how to administer a linux server though, i’m not sure if that’s true.