lowendbox.com has some pretty amazing deals on VPS servers. One in particular that jumped out at me was a 128MB / 10GB disk / 500GB bandwidth per month OpenVS server from DotVPS for only $15.00 per year.
[OpenVZ] 128MB RAM
128MB RAM 128MB Burst/vSWAP 1 vCPU core 10GB Diskspace 500GB Bandwidth OpenVZ/SolusVM 1 IPv4 Address 5 IPv6 Address (UK) 1Gbit port $15/Year
I was skeptical about a server this small being capable of hosting a WordPress powered site, but with a few tweaks I got it working perfectly. Here is how you can do the same, save yourself a ton of cash, and learn some awesome open-source goodness in the process.
1) Register a domain name. Registering your own domain name costs almost as much as the VPS server itself but I highly recommend getting one. You can do some neat things with a virtual hosts on your VPS server, but if your just getting started and want to play around with a VPS without committing to a name yet, you can skip this step for now and come back to it later. I use and highly recommend namecheap.com for all your domain registration needs.
2) Order your VPS server. If you haven’t done so yet use this link to order your VPS from DotVPS, or a similar VPS provider. This article is based on what I was provided – a 32 bit CentOS 5.8 powered Linux server. I’ll be using yum for installing all the packages. Debian based VPS’s are going to use apt-get and probably have different package naming schemes so ymmv.
3) Login as root and get to work installing packages. This is where the fun begins. If at any point you screw up so badly and you need to start over, you can login to your control panel and hit ‘reinstall’ to start from scratch. Fire up your favorite ssh client and login to your new server using the IP address, username and password established during setup.
First off, my server had apache2 pre-installed and already running. Apache is great, but I’m working with 128MB of RAM and need to conserve as much of it as possible. For my blog, I decided to use nginx along with an alternative php processor, php-fpm. Both of these projects are focused on 2 things that are very important – high performance and low memory consumption. A winning combination for a micro VPS server. I could have used lighthttpd instead but nginx is something I had no experience with and I’m always up for learning something new.
Kill off apache with:
service httpd stop
chkconfig httpd off
Next, enable a couple of extra repositories from Remi and EPEL to get access to nginx and php-fpm:
rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-5.rpm
Now install nginx and php-fpm with:
yum –enablerepo=remi,remi-test install php-pecl-apc php-cli php-pear php-pdo php-mysql php-pgsql php-pecl-mongo php-sqlite php-pecl-memcache php-pecl-memcached php-gd php-mbstring php-mcrypt php-xml
When its all done, fire up nginx, php-fpm, and set them to both start when the system comes up:
service nginx start
service php-fpm start
chkconfig nginx on
chkconfig php-fpm on
Yeah. Its that simple. You can fire up a web browser at this point and take a look at the default nginx welcome page using your server’s public IP address.
Now its time to install MySQL, start MySQL, and set it to start on boot:
yum –enablerepo=remi,remi-test install mysql mysql-server
service mysqld start
chkconfig mysqld on
Before you continue lets drop in a replacement mysql.conf file optimized for small memory systems:
cp /etc/my.cnf /etc/my.cnf.original
cp /usr/share/doc/mysql-server-5.5.32/my-small.cnf /etc/my.cnf
Then start the secure setup of MySQL. The default password for root is blank, so just hit enter when prompted and set a new one. You can say Y to everything else:
/usr/bin/mysql_secure_installation
Now we have nginx, php-fpm, and MySQL all setup and ready to go. Only 2 more steps remain. Setup nginx virtual-hosts and install WordPress.
Lets start with getting your virtual host setup. There are a couple of values you should define before going much further – the name of your site (most likely your domain name if you registered one), and the name of your database and user account that will connect to that database. You will want to have a new one for each virtual host you are hosting. You will also want to update the DNS A record for your domain to point to your VPS server’s IP address. When I did this with my provider, namecheap.com, the update was almost instant. When a http request is sent to your VPS, nginx looks at the host-header, looks up what virtual host is responsible for the content, and sends over the request. This makes is possible to host dozens of different websites using a single VPS server.
For my example, I’m using:
jasonoconnell.com as my domain
jasonoconnell as my web root
wordpress as my database name
wpuser as my wordpress DB username
wppass as my wordpress DB user’s password
Setup public_html and log directories for your new virtual host:
cd /var/www
mkdir -p jasonoconnell.com/{public_html,logs,stats}
Create a new config file for your virtual host:
vi /etc/nginx/conf.d/jasonoconnell.conf
Mine looks like this:
server {
listen 80;
server_name jasonoconnell.com www.jasonoconnell.com;
access_log /var/www/jasonoconnell.com/logs/access.log ;
error_log /var/www/jasonoconnell.com/logs/error.log ;
location / {
root /var/www/jasonoconnell.com/public_html;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
if (!-e $request_filename) {
rewrite ^(.*)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;
break;
}
}
error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
location = /50x.html {
root /var/www/jasonoconnell.com/public_html;
}
# pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
location ~ \.php$ {
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
root /var/www/jasonoconnell.com/public_html;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/jasonoconnell.com/public_html$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
location ~ /\.ht {
deny all;
}
}
You can test if its working by dropping in an index.html file under your virtual hosts public_html directory, restarting nginx, and looking for a response. You can take that a step further and also check to make sure php is working by creating a file called info.php with the following:
<?php
phpinfo();
?>
Point your browser at domain.com/info.php and you should see a bunch of info on your php install.
Last step, install and configure WordPress.
cd /tmp
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.zip
unzip latest.zip
mv wordpress/* /var/www/example.com/public_html/
rm -rf wordpress latest.zip
Connect to MySQL and setup the DB for WordPress:
mysql -u root -p
mysql> CREATE DATABASE wordpress;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO “wpuser”@”localhost” IDENTIFIED BY “wppass”;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> EXIT
Now tell WordPress how to connect to your DB. You only need to modify 3 values in the config file: DB_NAME, DB_USER, and DB_PASSWORD:
cd /var/www/jasonoconnell.com/public_html
cp wp-config-sample.php wp-config.php vi wp-config.php
// ** MySQL settings – You can get this info from your web host ** // /** The name of the database for WordPress */ define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’);
/** MySQL database username */
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘wpuser’);
/** MySQL database password */ define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘wppass’);
That’s it, your done! If all went well you should be able to type in your domain name and get to your new self-hosted WordPress site. Walk through the simple setup and you can start blogging away. In my next article, I’ll walk you through setting up Google AdSense to try and make back the $30 you just spent 🙂
