Moving to the Cloud: Creating your first ISP Manager account.

Posted on July 1, 2010 by Terry Myers

ISP Manager, which is offered free at VPS.NET, makes creating an account easy for your website easy. For those unfamiliar with ISP Manager, it is an alternative control panel available for managing your websites and server through a GUI interface. It has almost all the essential features, while also being lightweight on resource consumption making it great for small personal sites.

To get started with ISP Manger, enter http://yourip/manager into your browser window. ISP Manager will prompt you for the root password to login to the administrative interface. Once you're logged in, click on the link users. Here we will be able to create an account.

In the top right hand corner there will be a green plus image. Click on that to bring up the account creation screen.

To give the account adequate permissions, for both usability and security, click on the permissions tab inside the pop up box.

Next click on the limits tab, which will allow you to set limits on resource consumption.

ISP Manager also has the unique feature of allowing you to set CPU, RAM and Process limitations in it, which will prevent one user from overloading the system.

Finally, if you wish to leave a note about a user, you can do so under the notes tab.

Once you have entered in all the information in each of the tabs, you can click on the okay button. ISP Manager will restart Apache, and your account will now be active.

Moving to the Cloud: Creating your first account with your cPanel VPS

Posted on June 24, 2010 by Terry Myers

Creating your first account is one of the final steps you need to take before your website will be live on the cloud. Thankfully, it's also one of the easier tasks involved. We'll go through the steps of creating an account in both cPanel/WHM.

First login to WHM (Web Host Manager), which is the administrative interface for the cPanel control panel. To do so, you just need to go http://ipaddress.com:2086, where you'll be prompted for the root password. Once you login to WHM, go to the "Create a New Account" section.

The first steps to create your account are to enter your domain, and preferred login information.

If you have pre-defined packages, which set your resource specifications, you can set them in the next step.

If you have installed the RVSkin set, you can select from a list of RVSkins for your control panel theme. If you haven't purchased the RVSkin set, x3 is a default cPanel which still has the full functionality.

In the final section, if you're running an offsite mail server, this is the section you'll set it in using the remote mail exchanger option. If the VPS itself is hosting the mail server (and most will be), then you'll just use the local mail exchanger option.

At this point, you'll want to double check all the options to make sure that everything is correct. If it is, hit that "Create Account" button and watch WHM do it's thing. Once it has completed, you'll see the following confirmation page (and no, I do not use 123$$$terry as my password).

Don't worry ISP Manager users - you're up next week!

Moving to the Cloud: Setting up your first Cloud VPS.

Posted on June 16, 2010 by Terry Myers

Today lets handle the task of setting up our first Cloud VPS. First it's necessary we login to the VPS.NET control panel. Admittedly, the first couple of days I had to ask Nick where the login box was. I'll help everyone out by including a screen shot.

Once we're logged in, we'll see the home page for the VPS.NET control panel.

From here, we'll need to go to the Create New VPS Link. In step 1 of the create new VPS link, we need to decide how many nodes we're going to assign to the VPS. In my account, I have 4 nodes available; I'm going to assign all of them to this VPS.

In Step 2 and 3 we need to decide on a name and label for a web server. It's probably the most difficult decision you'll have to make, but don't stress it; the importance of this is minimal, and really only necessary for organizational purposes. Additionally, we need to decide what kind of backups should be made. I'm going to choose both Snapshot and Rsync, as it provides me with redundant backups with the Rsync backups being hosted offsite.

Once we reach Step 4, we simply need to decide on any licenses you want. If you choose CPanel the options for Softaculous, RVSkin and Litespeed Webserver are made available.

Step 5 is the fun and easy part. You get to decide where you want your cloud VPS to be hosted, and then what operating system you want. You have 4 choices: 1.) UK - London, England, 2.) US Central - Chicago, Illinois, .3) US East - Atlanta, Georgia, 4.) US West - Salt Lake City, Utah. If the location has multiple zones (essentially multiple clouds) you can choose which one you want to use. This allows you to spread your VPS's out, or if you want them all together, then you can do that as well. I'm going to be choosing Atlanta, with the Cloud Optimized Debian Linux Operating System.

Once we click submit, we'll be taken to the details page for the VPS, which will show the root password and IP Address of the server. The server status will show it as running a task while the VPS is created. This typically only takes 2- 3 minutes. After your VPS is all setup, you'll see a page that looks like this.

Moving to the Cloud: Part 1 – How many nodes do I need?

Posted on June 2, 2010 by Terry Myers

One of the most commonly asked questions we receive prior to the client signing up, is "How many nodes will my site require?" Unfortunately we don't have a 3 step mathematical equation to figure out exactly what you need, but using your traffic figures, your current hosting arrangement and expected growth we can pretty easily figure that out.

Most sites coming from a shared server really only need a couple of nodes. Something to keep in mind with a shared server is your site is sharing resources with every other site on the server, so while 600 MHZ may not seem like a lot, it may in fact be significantly more than your site is currently using. If your site is only hosting images, HTML pages, and some downloads, typically 1 node is all you need. The static files (thankfully) don't use a whole lot of processing power, requiring the web server to only send out the data.

However, if your site using dynamic content containing programming languages like CGI, PHP, Ruby, with some sort of database backend, then we typically recommend the client go with at least 2 nodes. The processing of the files, while also requiring data from a database just requires a little bit more power... and we enjoying delivering it.

If your site is coming from another VPS provider or from a Dedicated Server, one of the first recommendations we make is to match up the CPU & RAM levels. So if you currently have a server with a 2.4 GHZ Processor and a 1 GB of Ram, you'd likely want to go with 4 nodes, which would actually give you 500 MBs of additional RAM for growth.

Are there any sites you can't handle? Certainly a site like CNN.Com would be difficult, but through the power of our cloud VPS servers, and CDN hosting, it'll be quite difficult to give us something we can't handle. We enjoy the challenge of handling the growing the site, so if you have a site that needs a host, get in touch. More than likely we have what you need.