Thursday, February 5, 2009

Really cheap webhosting?

If you ever wanted to have unlimited websites managed all from one place, instead of paying for extremely limited access to hosting servers which are insecure, and expensive?

I got myself my first VPS a few days ago from http://www.vpsvillage.com. It costs me only 6$/mo and I get to put there as many websites I want (well, it's my server, that's the point of it). Not only that, but a VPS is much more secure than shared webhosting. If a hacker takes over a shared hosting server from any webpage, he could easily take over your files and read your source code from the websites (which could often contain passwords and other secret information). It's not that it's impossible to take over a VPS hosting server, it's just much more difficult to do even if a hacker succeeds on taking over one of the VPS servers.

Of course there's a catch - you have to learn how to be your own webhosting IT manager. I admit - it's not an easy task, but once you learn how to do it, having full control over your website is a huge benefit.

I would suggest using Debian for a start, and reading some HOWTO's on howtoforge.com. For example, to set up a LAMP server (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP), what you should do is follow simple instructions from here - http://www.howtoforge.com/ubuntu_debian_lamp_server. Setting up unlimited (duuuh) mailboxes and mail forwarding is easily done using postfix, and you can even set up your own DNS server on the VPS, so adding domains to your VPS is also very easy.

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