CONFIGURATION AND INSTALLATION OF CENTOS WEB-PANEL ON AMAZON AWS

CONFIGURATION AND INSTALLATION OF CENTOS WEB-PANEL ON AMAZON AWS

Cento web-panel is an opensource web based control panel which can only be installed on Centos Operating system Here we will discuss its installation on the amazon aws. There is no particular reason for the usage of amazon aws its only due to personal experience.the process of installation on Amazon was is as follow

• Open amazon was console management and create a new instance on EC2
• On this instance install CENTOS 6 which is currently the only supported version of centos in cents web-panel
• after the installation visit the cents web-panel and follow the instructions for the download and installation of latest version of cents web-panel
  
• after following the steps you will get the Mysql db administrator password at the end.
  

Creating Nameservers for your Server in VestaCP

Creating and configuring DNS and  Nameservers

• As we have setup VestaCP the next phase is configuration
• Now we are able to access our server with ip address
• We want to access our server with domain name
• Setting up the domain name requires to register a domain with domain registrar the most commonly used is godaddy.com
• So we would be describing the process through using godaddy.com
• Go to godaddy.com and register a domain like yourdomain.com
• Go to godaddy and click on domain and click on manage

• Add two hostname using ns1 and ns2 and point to your elastic ip
• Now change the nameservers of your domain to ns1.yourdomain.com and ns2.yourdomain.com

• Go to your VestaCP and add website and check the DNS and Mail
• Now go to DNS and edit yourdomain.com and change the template to ns-child also change the IP to your elastic IP

• Now go to the packages and edit the default package and edit the ns records to

ns1.yourdomain.com

ns2.yourdomain.com

• Save it and you are done with configuring the nameservers and you would able to access the VestaCP using yourdomain.com:8083
• Now you can use these ns1.yourdomain.com and ns2.yourdomain.com for other domains to point to your server

VestaCP Installation and Configuration on Amazon Aws EC2

Web hosting servers installation and Configuration

• We have discussed in the previous post the requirements of servers for web hosting. The servers remains the same for almost all type of web hosting
• The one application we have choice is the control panel it is the application through which we manage the resources of our server in web browser
• There are multiple options in selecting control panel.the famous of them are cpanel , plesk, ISPConfig and Webmin the cpanel and plesk are closed source and you have to buy license where as the ISPconfig and Webmin are open source and you can use them free of cost
• Here we would be using a newly trending VestaCP. It can be considered as a child in the competition but after its study it full fill all our needs and requirements it have a very user friendly interface and easy to install and configure.
• Mostly, all the control panels install , all the required server by themselves so instead of installing each server separately we will install the panel. And it would make the installations for the server applications
• The installation of VestaCP is described on there home page(https://vestacp.com/) you can access through the url  as below.

ssh root@your.server# Download installation scriptcurl -O http://vestacp.com/pub/vst-install.sh#

Run it bash 

vst-install.sh

• Note the username and password in the terminal
• After the installation goto the Amazon aws management console and add access to the instance on the port 8083
  
• Now the browser in url put your IP and port like this xxx.xxx.xxx.xx:8083
• Enter your login username and password the username remains admin unless you globally change and if you have provided the password the that would be used otherwise in your terminal it would be shown in the end
  
• After login go to firewall and note all the ports with protocol.
• As you have noted the ports in firewall the next step is again go to amazon aws management console and give access to all the noted ports with protocol
• Now our web hosting server is ready for further configuration please visit our next post.

Features of a Common Web-Hosting Server

Features of a common web-hosting server

A normal web hosting server requires the following web hosting server applications

1. Apache server for processing and web based requests.it work on ports 80 and 443 or 8080 for communication on http and https protocol.it execute the application on the server and present result as response to the user
2. Vsftpd Server it is used to give access to users to upload and data and applications and handle there space on server the communication is done on port 21 and various other ports are used to manage the system for deep knowledge study the ftp passive and active mode file transfer it use the FTP protocol
3. Bind Server transfer Domain name to specific IP the port used for the processing is 53 and it is using the DNS protocol also called Domain name server
4. Msql is a database server used for saving data in RDBMS format for the user
5. Phpmyadmin is an application which is executed through apache server and it is used for accessing and managing data on the mysql in browser
6. exim a mail server for user to mange there business email it use port 25 and work on smtp protocol
7. Control panel it is the most important part of any web host to mange there servers
   

The above servers would solve the following requirements for our server which can be most easily handout like the below

• We have the power to add and manage multiple users
• We can enforce limits on users on the usage of server resources
• The server give us the way to be backup and manage
• We can setup task that can be executed on specific time without our needs automatically means Cron system
• We give the access to the users to manage there database and application in web browser easily
• We have a view to add send and receive emails
• A complete web based solution for us and our customers or other users

The above requirements and handouts give us a road map, which shows what we have to build actually the further installation and configuration would be described in the next post

Creating and Setting up a Web Hosting Server Using Amazon EC2

Creating and Setting up a Web Hosting Server

As there are a lot of web hosting companies available on very cheap costs. why would someone want to setup his own server. There come the needs where some of them can be like these

1. You don’t have full control
2. You are scared of data share
3. You can’t execute a simple command like grip
4. Your usage is lesser than the fee
5. Your requirements are increased and the you are unable to increase the resources
6. You have multiple customers and you want to profit in the hosting service

If any reason of the above or other and you are committed to setup a hosting service than you are at the right place.

• For setting up a web hosting service we have two options either we create and deploy our own physical server where we would have to maintain all the resources required for a server physically or we go for Cloud where we rent the required resources.
• In some cases setting up a physical server would be a waste of resources and time now a days. So we I would be going through how to setup server in cloud which is easy and let the other to maintain for us.
• There are a lot of cloud Iaas(Infrastructure as a service) services available on the net of which famous are Amazon EC2, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Digital Ocean.
• You can select anyone according to your requirements and usage here I would be using Amazon EC2 due to my previous personnel experience and requirements.
• You have to create a instance on the server and make it accessible by SSH so that you can install and configure software’s on the server.
  
• I have created Ubuntu 14 Instance on EC2 using micro as with requirements we will increases the resources
• Assign an Elastic IP to the Instance. Which is like static IP but have feature that you can later assign it to another instance
• Further installation and configuration would be coming up in the future posts