Re: OT: (Web) server administration advice

[Steve Lacy]

Web server & mailman are pretty straightforward, even with a fairly large number of domains.  Once you get the first one done, you can pretty much cut & paste to generate the rest of the configs with unique DocumentRoots, or however you're structuring things.  Make sure to use apache2's "conf.d" style. 

The one thing that raised a red flag for me is the "mail server and accounts".  Are you talking about receiving mail on your custom domain?  Getting mail servers secure, dealing with SPAM & virus protection, are both huge issues.  That's one place where I would never go back to self-hosted.  Getting mail hosted via a Google Apps domain is the way to go for single-user cases. 

Or, if you're just talking about sending mail (i.e. mailman-esque) then you can self-host this without too many issues. 

Last piece of advice is make sure you're running a firewall on the server.  I recommend ufw for it's simplicity (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UFW)  If your host is Amazon AWS, you do get some firewalling included, which is also nice. 

Lots of people seem to use linode for exactly what you describe.  Have you looked at them?  https://www.linode.com/pricing

Another choice for "toy domains" is to run the VM on any other machines you happen to have, and host directly from that.  That's what I do for several of my domains to save on cost when I don't really care about uptime (although the uptime is generally good on my home network connection) 

Happy to answer any other admin questions offline if you'd like. 

Steve

On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 1:34 PM, Urs Liska <address@hidden> wrote:

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



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