Rip Up Your Own CHEAP Web Hosting Ready VPS In About 3 Minutes

Steve Brownlie

Steve Brownlie

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I'm not really going into why I'm doing this - except to say I'm having a play with the cloud for a future idea I have. But it turns out it's super easy to get a cheap (not paying for cpanel etc) but fully web ready, and easy-to-use (essential for me - don't want to be managing sites from the command line particularly...) VPS for hosting a bunch of your sites, apps and other stuff in the cloud. Scalable for when you need it but just over $10/month when the sites and apps you host aren't doing much.

Step 1 - Pick A Cloud Platform

Well this one was easy since I'd stuck $25 on Jelastic and got a 50% bonus (should have deposited more lol) to test out deploying python apps in the cloud etc. I picked Web Hosting.net since they seemed to have the best location/price/rating mix out of the list Jelastic offered (http://webhosting.net/jelastic/).

So the steps here are insanely simple. Sign into your jelastic admin account. Hit create environment, click everything else off except VPS, pick centOS (you seem to get a very up to date version) and hit go. About 30 seconds later you have a VPS set up with a public ip etc. Everything you need if you're an experienced developer... which I'm not so onto step 2.

Step 2 - Pick a Web Hosting Control Panel/Config

The beauty of the Jelastic VPS install is that it's pretty clean/unconfigured which most of the panels seem to need. I tried to pick a light one that wouldn't use too much memory - the one I picked was Sentora (http://sentora.org/about) which seems to have everything you need to run a web hosting server, except a web-based file manager (you can just FTP in as usual). It ended up needing memory such that just 2 cloudlets (they are somewhere around $5/mo each) to run when not much is going on.

Steps required (slightly more than the jelastic step 1, but only just...):

- buy a domain (that'll be your server's domain eg someoneshosting.net)
- point two a records at your server IP (available in your jelastic control panel - https://docs.jelastic.com/vps#installation) - yourdomain.com and something like hosting.yourdomain.com (you need the subdomain one to log in later)
- wait for DNS to propagate
- SSH into your server (ssh root@yourip) - password emailed to you by jelastic (jelastic cloud also has a terminal in a browser thing for those of you who aren't on linux/don't have an SSH app installed on windows but it's buggy so I recommend getting one or installing ubuntu for windows so you can get a bash terminal in windows).
- Type the command found here - http://docs.sentora.org/?node=22 -
~$ bash <(curl -L -Ss http://sentora.org/install)
- Fill in the things it asks for (domain, ip etc)
- go to your subdomain eg hosting.yourdomain.com
- the login details appeared in your terminal after installing, log in

And boom - about 3 minutes and for $10/month you have your own fully functional VPS with control panel, hosted in the cloud and ready to go.

I have no idea if I made all the right choices etc, and I'm sure some of the dev ops guys will chime in with improvements/other options etc but I thought I'd post this in orientation as I didn't realize it would be so easy to get up and running with my own server without buying it from someone pre configured etc as I'd normally do.
 
Went through this not long ago for a project I didn't want associated with my dedicated, and also didn't feel like paying for WHM/cPanel. Came to the conclusion that Webmin/Virtualmin is a very good choice for an admin panel. Very easy to setup, lightweight, secure and maintained/updated on the regular.
 
jäger said:
Went through this not long ago for a project I didn't want associated with my dedicated, and also didn't feel like paying for WHM/cPanel. Came to the conclusion that Webmin/Virtualmin is a very good choice for an admin panel. Very easy to setup, lightweight, secure and maintained/updated on the regular.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip jager, I'll try that out. Not committed to anything at this stage, just playing around. As you say it's nice to have a backup 'box' to play with that's set up and working.
 
Nice job! One thing I'll say is make sure you have backups and updating the OS and applications on a regular schedule. Harden your box by limiting SSH attempts, look at implementing port knocking if your a geek, and minimize the amount of software running. At a minimum, verify your services are configed to have as little outside world exposure as possible (meaning open ports, config pages, error pages). Get nmap. Do some scans against your host because others will (if you are unfamiliar do this and it will print out just about everything for TCP scan: nmap -A -sS -p- <your ip>). Run nikto against your webapps. Do everything you can from a low privileged account like not running mysql or your webserver from root.

Bottom line: security is a huge concern, especially if you are new to managing public facing servers. So take some time to learn the basics of protection and ALWAYS have backups! You will get scanned, pentested, bruteforced, etc., so do some work and make sure you play safe.
 
digital ocean + serverpilot is also another great cheap option if you aren't afraid to learn how to set up a vps yourself.
 
Why not just use Cloudways? Easyengine on linode or vultr also comes to mind...
 
Another extremely fast and light weight hosting control panel I use is Vestacp....it uses minimal resources....I like it.....it just needs a file manger...which you can purchase(no need)...other wise you just upload everything via filezilla
 
Vince said:
I always use fail2ban that takes a minute to setup
Click to expand...
fail2ban protects you from brute force attacks (which are not evective anyway if you disable password SSH logins), while fwknop additionally protects you from future 0-day vulnerabilties. The attackers won't even have the chance to connect to your service because the port will always be closed for them.
 
Cloudways / Easyengine / Serverpilot is another management layer. It's supposed to make things simpler, but it is another layer, another panel to log into. I think cloud providers are heading in the direction of offering one-click apps in the cloud to get rid of the need for a management layer. The cloud provider's dashboard becomes your defacto control panel. I mean, I haven't used Cloudways, but DigitalOcean's Wordpress image means you really don't need that extra layer to get up and running.
 
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