OT: (Web) server administration advice

[Urs Liska]

Hi all,

I'm in (some) need for feedback regarding the complexity of (web) server
administration. I am running a "virtual private server", which is a
virtual machine in a server of an ISP's server farm. So I "own" root
access to a full Debian installation, with all responsibility for it but
also all possibilities.

This server is "managed" by Plesk, a comprehensive server administration
tool. This has probably helped me a lot getting everything to run in the
first place, but by now I'm rather annoyed by the fact that it does so
many things "the Plesk way" instead of sticking to proven Linux ways. It
significantly interferes with domain and web server management, provides
its own mechanism to install "apps" etc. As a result it obscures away
tons of things and makes it very hard to find documentation and
assistance for more or less default tasks such as configuring virtual
hosts on Apache (to make web apps like Gitlab work).

By now I'm so annoyed that I consider changing this and "falling back"
to a plain Linux server. But OTOH I'm reluctant to do so because then I
would *have* to do everything on my own, presumably all on the command
line and without the convenient web interface. So is anybody able to
give me an estimate how big the risks are that I end up with a system
that doesn't do what I need at all? Well, the basic things I'd need to
set up properly are
- web server
- a small number of domains and a bigger number of subdomains
- mail server and accounts
- mailman
This is what I would rely on having set up more or less instantly in
order to avoid outage. Everything else, from Git server and LilyPond
building over dynamic DNS or whatever could wait and accept to be more
hassle-like.

I am by now a rather seasoned Linux user, having installed, maintained
and used my installations on several computers for nearly 10 years. I
have administered my current server through the SSH console to some
extent already. But of course I'm far from being a competent sysadmin.

I know this is extremely hard to tell for anyone else. But maybe you
*do* have some comments for me that might help me deciding whether to go
in that direction or not.

Best
Urs

-- 
Urs Liska
www.openlilylib.org