A large percentage of unmanaged VPS customers are website developers, they use our service as a testing environment whilst they work on developing their scripts / software.

The important question is, why is a VPS important for a website developer?

A VPS (Virtual Private Server) offers totally dedicated server resources to you.

In the early stages of a website development project, the scripting can be messy and quite resource hungry. A shared web hosting provider needs to monitor their services for things like this. Due to the fact that shared web hosting will be sharing a server with hundreds of other customers websites, everyone has to play fair and use their fair share of server resources. A shared web hosting provider will kick you straight off of their servers if your script is taking up high server resources, or in a worst case scenario your code may even loop! This can cause the entire server to crash due to high CPU load. The host and it’s customers won’t be very happy if you loop their server.

You won’t have this problem with a VPS. If your script is using a high amount of server resources this effects nobody else but you. If your script loops, you can just reboot the VPS and fix the faulty coding. You won’t have complaints from your web host.

Improved server resource monitoring.

If you’re developing a website script, in most situations you’d want it to use as little server resources as possible. When the script goes live and the website has a lot of visitors, the more resource demanding your script is, the more money the website owner will need to spend on hosting it. For example, if you script is quite resource demanding and you have 100 visitors on your site at the same time, every time the visitor loads a new page, your server is processing multiple apache connections along with querying a database, etc. The more resource friendly the script is, will make the difference on whether you require an entire dedicated server or just a VPS to host your website. There can be quite a large price difference between the two hosting solutions, and when you are paying renewal fees constantly to keep the site online, it can be quite costly.

When developing your website script on a VPS, you will have full access to monitor your servers resource usage. This will help you with improving it’s resource efficiency.

Full control over the configuration of your server.

All scripts require the server to be set up differently. They require different Apache modules to be installed for parts of the code to operate correctly. A shared web hosting provider will have their servers set up in a way to provide the best overall service and security for their customers. They will have a lot of restrictions on their Apache configuration, this stops people using scripts to carry out certain actions, which may degrade the service for other customers sharing the server with you. If the shared web hosting provider doesn’t allow a certain mod to be enabled on their server, your script may not work correctly, and you cannot complete your development project.

With a VPS you have FULL control over how you configure the server. You can change the Apache configuration at any time to enable or disable certain modules.

No limits to how many databases or other features you can create.

You will find that shared web hosting providers often allocate certain packages with feature limits. They may only allow 1 database to be created on a certain package. This can be very restrictive for a website developer.

A VPS has no limits to how many databases, domains, email addresses or other features you can have. You are in total control of your own server, you can manage it however you like to suit your development project.

I hope you found this useful for your future development projects. There are plenty of VPS hosting providers about to suit any requirement, good luck in your hunt. If you have any questions, please leave a comment.

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Firstly, check that you have a fresh install of your chosen operating system (CentOS is recommended) and that SELinux is disabled (How do you disable SELinux? find out below).

Connect to your server through the root SSH login.

Edit the file at directory “/etc/selinux/config“, if you are using nano on your server, you can use the following command to open the file for editing through SSH:

1. nano /etc/selinux/config

Replace:

1. SELINUX=enabled

With:

1. SELINUX=disabled

Save the file and continue by entering the following commands:

1. cd /home
2. wget http://layer1.cpanel.net/latest
3. sh latest
4. /usr/local/cpanel/cpkeyclt

Problems during installation?

A common problem which occurs near the beginning of the cPanel installation, is an incorrect hostname.

cPanel requires that your system is setup with a full hostname (e.g. server1.mydomain.com NOT JUST server1).

To fix this hostname problem, simply run the following command:

hostname yourhostnamehere

(Replace “yourhostnamehere” with your full required hostname as shown in the example above)

Once setup has successfully completed you can access your WHM at http://yourip:2087/.

We have seen many tutorials for this about, however, cannot find quick and easy answers to some problems/errors which you can sometimes face during the installation. We have added the commands to fix these problems at the bottom of this tutorial.

Run the commands below under your root SSH login, this are the only commands required for installing cPanel-DNS as long as you don’t receive any errors:

cd /tmp

wget http://layer1.cpanel.net/cpanel-dnsonly-install.sea

sh cpanel-dnsonly-install.sea

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Problem during installation?

There are some problems you may face, we have listed the commands required to fix some of these:

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When installing you may be faced with an error such as:

-bash-3.2# sh cpanel-dnsonly-install.sea
Creating directory installd
Verifying archive integrity… All good.
Uncompressing cplyr1-cPanel-dnsonlyExtraction failed.
Terminated

This problem normally occurs when you are trying to install cPanel-DNS onto a server which is not running a base installation of the operating system. To fix this, you can run the following command, however if you are trying to install this on a server which already has data which you don’t have backed up, then you should back it up first.

This command will turn your operating system into the base installation:

yum groupinstall base -y

After you have run this, try to install cPanel-DNS using the original commands.

Did you receive an error when trying to run the base install command above?

Error: Missing Dependency: rpm = 4.4.2-48.el5 is needed by package rpm-libs

An error similar to this is normally the result of trying to run the “groupinstall base” command onto a 32bit VPS operating on a 64bit node, and can be resolved quickly with the following command:

echo i686-redhat-linux > /etc/rpm/platform

After you have run this, try to run the “yum groupinstall base -y” command again.

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Your installation may also error if you have not setup a correct hostname on your server, cPanel requires that your system is setup with a full hostname (e.g. server1.mydomain.com NOT JUST server1).

To fix this hostname problem, simply run the following command:

hostname yourhostnamehere

(Replace “yourhostnamehere” with your full required hostname as shown in the example above)

If you are having this problem on a VPS, then you may be required to set the hostname within your VPS control panel or request the change with your host, otherwise upon a reboot it may reset back to the original hostname set within the VPS configuration.

Right, we have planned that our blog will include everything from our special offers and day-to-day activities to our plans for the future. We would like to be able to make our blog an interactive community between us and our clientele, we would like to learn from our customers so we can improve our company and its services.

That’s it for our first blog! and we hope to build upon this shortly.