Managing your own virtual server can be really fun and a great learning experience! With this tutorial I will show you how to deploy and setup your own virtual server and install Vesta Control Panel to host and manage your websites in under an hour. Instead of relying on third party web hosting services and sharing the server resources with hundreds of other websites which can affect your performance, having your own VPS is the way to go!
First you’ll need to get yourself a VPS. There’s plenty of providers offering cheap and reliable servers, but I personally suggest using Digital Ocean since they are currently the most respected provider in the cloud hosting industry, having over 7 million cloud servers deployed.
You can pick the most basic plan, which costs only 5$/month! With this plan you get 1 Xeon core, 512MB RAM and 20GB of ultra fast SSD storage space. When creating your “droplet” as DO refers to it’s servers, pick the 64-bit version of Ubuntu 14.04 as your operating system, and choose a server location that best suits your needs. I also suggest you enable automatic backups, so in case anything goes wrong with your server, you can restore it back.
After completing all the steps, your login password should be emailed to you. Although not the most preffered and safest way to have your password sent over to you by e-mail, it’s the most fastest. The other way is loging to your server using private / public keys, but I’ll explain that in some other tutorial. Loging to your server will be accomplished trough the (secure shell) SSH client Putty. Once you’ve downloaded it, enter your server’s IP address, login as root and enter your password. I really suggest you run through this tutorial in order to strenghten your system’s security before installing Vesta.
Installing Vesta is straightforward and it shold take only a few minutes. Download the Vesta automated installation script using the command:
curl -O http://vestacp.com/pub/vst-install.sh
and then run it using the command:
sudo bash vst-install.sh
Upon installation Vesta will generate a password for you, which could be changed with the following command:
sudo /usr/local/vesta/bin/v-change-user-password admin NEW_PASSWORD
To log in, just point your browser at: https://<your-ip-address-or-url>:8083/ and you’re in!
If you need more help, head over to the Vesta Documentation page, where you’ll find everything you need about managing and running your control panel.