Hosting Your Website

Get A Domain

Get A Hosting Provider/VPS

Tools:

Operating Systems

Most VPS's should offer a list of operating systems to use we recommend:

  • Ubuntu - one of the most popularly used Linux OS (recommended)

  • CentOS - A community build distro based on "RedHat" very stable

  • Debian - Great alternative for CentOS - both are similar, except that Debian uses “apt-get” and “.deb” while CentOS uses “yum” and “rpm”

Note: you more then likely will NOT have a visual interface for this and will need to use FileZilla (ftp client) & Putty (ssh client)

Get root

Make sure whatever you go with you have root access to the server this is needed to install the proper tools needed.

Create A dedicated hosting user

It is a good idea to make a user account dedicated for only the web hosting server to prevent any issues, the user must be able to use sudo/root

Install Apache

Locate server IP by running command: hostname -I | awk '{print $1}'

Installation

  • Open your ssh tool (putty) on your PC & login to your dedicated server account (Ex. IP: 10.0.0.1 | user: webserver | Password: W3B$3rv3r2020@ | Port: 22)

  • Make sure everything is up to date by typing sudo apt-get update or Sudo yum update

  • Install Apache by typing sudo apt-get install apache2

  • Verify Apache installation, open your browser and navigate to (Ex. http://10.0.0.1 , your server IP) if successful you should see the Apache 2 page

Configure Your Firewall

  • Start by viewing the available app profiles on UFW: sudo ufw show app list

  • You should see a list similar to this one:

Available applications:

      • Apache

      • Apache Full

      • Apache Secure

      • OpenSSH

  • Run this command to allow normal traffic on port 80: sudo ufw allow 'Apache' to check the status run sudo ufw status

Apache Commands

Stop Apache: sudo systemctl stop apache2.service

Start Apache: sudo systemctl start apache2.service

Restart Apache: sudo systemctl restart apache2.service

Reload Apache: sudo systemctl reload apache2.service