In this series I’m going to migrate my shared hosting website to a VPS. One of my weaker points is the network and sysadmin stuff. A reason for this is that all servers at my work are managed by a different company and if there is anything network related for our department this is usually done by the developers which have sysadmin knowledge from previous jobs. So that’s the reason I want to start using a VPS instead of a normal shared hosting account. Off course this has a lot more advantages but it’s also a nice opportunity to learn some sysadmin things. So beware, this is my first time I’m going to use a VPS. Please send me a mail if you read something stupid, this could also be a writing error because my English is not that great. This series is also a nice documentation for myself if I need to repeat things in the future.

Why a VPS?

It’s obvious that a VPS (Virtual Private Server) has a lot advantages over a simple (and cheaper) shared hosting account. For now I’m going to focus on the advantages but one of the disadvantages is off course that it’s a lot more work to get your site running but in my case that’s only a good thing because I want to learn how this works. Comparing both is also difficult because the services differ per hosting provider and even at my work the shared hosting has changes a lot over the last years.

Here are a few great things you get with a VPS.

• More power and space – a VPS usually is a lot more powerful and lets you host multiple websites.
• Command line – I love the command line, don’t need to explain why.
• Software – More freedom to install software, tools, PHP versions and extensions etc

Which operating system?

This is not a topic I know a lot about. I’ve heard good things about Ubuntu from podcasts and colleagues so I went for Ubuntu 16.04 (check version via “lsb_release -a”) with Apache as webserver.

I was sure I didn’t want a Windows OS for my VPS. I’m not sure what the differences are between Debian and CentOS. I know that you get fast updates for programs with Ubuntu and that Debian and CentOS are a bit more careful/slow but also safer and more stable. But for me it’s ideal that I can use the latest tools and programs for my private projects.

As mentioned earlier, I don’t have much experience with setting up a VPS. Somewhere in 2016 I tried a VPS with Ubuntu 14.04 but I didn’t get much further than “Hello world” in a Symfony project. Because I forgot most things and I used a lot of panels like phpMyAdmin and Webmin I wanted to start over and document each step for my blog. This time I also don’t want to use any control panels anymore. I’m also not sure if I’m going to update the blogs over time, I don’t think so.