content/blog/2021-03-30-vps-web-server.org

Choosing a place to host a website is one of the most confusing decisions for beginner web developers. Even for experienced web devs, choosing between different forms of web hosting can be a daunting choice.

First, let's take a look at shared web hosting. Shared web hosting is a product where you are purchasing a small piece of a web server that is being shared between many websites. As a result, the cost of shared hosting is extremely low. You won't have access to the server itself, which means you can't install your own software on the server, such as Docker. Usually, you are simply allowed to connect your domains to the server, set up domain security, and other small utilities.

In contrast, a virtual private server (VPS) is a virtual machine that replicates the environment of having a dedicated server to yourself. You are able to control the virtual server's host names, base file system, package manager, etc. Another great upside of a VPS is that since it's virtual, the company providing the VPS can dynamically increase the disk size, RAM size, or number of CPUs at any time. However, the virtual server is still physically located on a server that is shared between multiple virtual servers.

The choice between shared hosting and VPS mostly depends on your skill level with system administration. If you're comforting working on a server that is mostly left up to you (or you're willing to learn), then a VPS is usually a better option. However, shared hosting is a fantastic option for people who don't want to have to learn how to manage their server.

I had used shared hosting for approximately 5 years before trying my first VPS. I manage a homelab and have had success running a server and performing typical sysadmin duties, but I was still hesitant to get a VPS. One fear was that I always struggled to properly set up the networking part of a server - DNS and hostname configurations were not my friend.

As a little bit of background, I originally used Siteground for my initially shared hosting and stayed on that platform for at least a year. However, the UI was clunky, and I didn't like how they handled certain technical aspects, so I switched to Namecheap. Namecheap was great because it is the service I primarily use for purchasing domain names, which made it incredibly easy to link them to my hosting service. However, it was still mediocre shared hosting, and Namecheap is notorious for not letting you use Let's Encrypt to obtain free SSL/TLS certificates; Namecheap wants to make you purchase certificates through their store.

Finally, I settled down with iWebFusion for about the last year of my shared hosting. This service was pretty great, came with free SSL/TLS, and I never had any complaints.

However, I finally grew tired of not being able to install software on my own web server. I wanted to be able to try out things like Postmill or Matrix. This is possible with a VPS, so I decided to grab a new domain name to try it out.

The first step to moving over to a VPS is (you guessed it): finding a VPS provider. For my VPSs, I use 1984 and prefer their services much more than any alternative, due to their location (Iceland), their privacy policy, their respect for GDPR, and the ability to remain anonymous if you pay in Bitcoin or Monero.

Njalla is another good, privacy-oriented option for VPS services.

You'll have to decide what specifications you want on your VPS. For me, I only build and deploy low-resource HTML, PHP, and Python websites. This means I can survive on the smallest VPS: 1 CPU, 1GB of RAM, and 25GB SSD for $5.00 per month.

As noted above, the great thing about a VPS is you can request your provider to increase the resources at any time.

Okay, so now let's get into some actual work that has to be done to get content moved from a shared host to a VPS. At this point, I'm assuming you have a shared host with website content that you can still access, and you've purchased a new VPS and can SSH into that server.

The first change is minor, but it should be done immediately in order to get things moving: DNS settings. Go to wherever your DNS settings are handled. If your shared host also managed your DNS settings, you'll need to first move that DNS over to your new VPS provider. For me, I route my DNS through Gandi.

Once you know where your DNS settings are, go ahead and update the A records to match the public IP address of your VPS. For example:

A         example.com     xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
A         subdomain       xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
CNAME     www             example.com.

If you have any other records that require updates, such as MX or TXT records for a mail server, be sure to update those accordingly. Personally, I don't host my own mail server. I route all mail on my custom domains to Migadu. Hosting your own email server can become complex quickly and is not for beginners.

DNS changes can take up to 48 hours to propagate, so be sure to give it some time before assuming you've made an error.

Now that the DNS settings have been changed, let's set up our server while we wait for the DNS to propagate. First up is to ssh into your server. If you've signed up with a service like DigitalOcean, you can add your SSH key to your account and to your VPS droplet so that you don't need a password in order to SSH.

ssh root@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

The VPS that is used in this blog post runs Ubuntu 20.04 with an Apache web server. If you're working on a different operating system (OS) or want a different web server, such as Nginx, you'll have to use different commands to set it up.

First, let's update and upgrade our server.

NOTE: Since we have logged in to the server as root for now, we don't need to use the sudo modifier before our commands.

apt update && apt upgrade -y

While being able to use root can be beneficial at times, you shouldn't use root unless you have to.

So let's set up a new user in our system. The -m option below tells the OS to create a home directory for the new user.

adduser USERNAME

Now, create a password for that user.

passwd USERNAME

Finally, add the user to the sudoers file, so they can perform priveleged commands.

usermod -a -G sudo USERNAME

If you are using SSH keys and not passwords, you'll need to copy your SSH key from your local machine to the VPS. If you haven't disabled password-based SSH yet, the easiest way to do this is ssh-copy-id from your local computer (not from the VPS):

ssh-copy-id testuser@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

If you've disabled password-based SSH, you'll need to manually copy your SSH key into the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file.

Our goal here is to host a web server, so the next step is to install the Apache web server and any other packages we need.

From this point on, I will be logged in as a user (not root) and will need to use the sudo modifier for most commands.

sudo apt update; sudo apt upgrade -y; sudo apt autoremove -y
sudo apt install apache2

If you need other language support, such as PHP, you'll need to install that too.

sudo apt install libapache2-mod-php php-dom
sudo a2enmod php
sudo systemctl restart apache2

Next up is to create the directories for the domain(s) we want to be hosted on this web server.

cd /var/www
sudo mkdir example.com

We have a folder for example.com now, so let's add an index.html file and put it within a specific public_html folder. You don't need this public_html if you don't want it, but it helps with organizing items related to example.com that you don't want to publish to the internet.

cd example.com
sudo mkdir public_html && cd public_html
sudo nano index.html

You can put anything you want in this index.html file. If you can't think of anything, paste this in there:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8" />
        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
        <title>Hello, world!</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>Hello, world!</h1>
    </body>
</html>

If you want something to be served at example.com/page01/file.txt, you'll have to create the page01 directory under the example.com directory. For example:

cd /var/www/example.com/public_html
sudo mkdir page01
sudo nano file.txt

Now, let's set up the files that will tell the server where to find the files for example.com. We will copy the default configuration file and create our own.

cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
sudo cp 000-default.conf example.com.conf
sudo nano example.com.conf

This configuration file will have a few default lines, but you'll need to edit it to look similar to this (settings may change based on your personal needs):

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin your-email@email-provider.com
    ServerName example.com
    ServerAlias www.example.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/example.com/public_html
    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Now, enable the configuration for your new site, disable the default configuration, and reload the web server.

sudo a2ensite example.com.conf
sudo a2dissite 000-default.conf
sudo systemctl reload apache2

You can always run a test to make sure no errors or warnings are found in your configuration files.

sudo apache2ctl configtest

Now, restart the web server entirely. After this, you should be able to browse to http://example.com and see the HTML content you provided earlier. Note that SSL/TLS has not been enabled yet, so you won't be able to use the secure version yet (https://example.com).

sudo systemctl restart apache2

You can repeat this for as many websites as you need. Just create the domain folders in /var/www/, add the configuration file, enable the configuration, and restart apache2.

In order to serve secure content, you'll need to obtain SSL/TLS certificates. Luckily, there's a free tool called Certbot that helps us with the process.

The first step is to install snapd and core for Ubuntu.

sudo apt install snapd
sudo snap install core
sudo snap refresh core

Next, install the certbot snap package.

sudo snap install --classic certbot

Execute the following command to ensure that the certbot command can be run.

sudo ln -s /snap/bin/certbot /usr/bin/certbot

Finally, you can run certbot one of two ways:

1. run it and let it alter your Apache configuration files automatically to enable HTTPS redirects.
2. run it and only allow it to create certificates. You'll need to manually alter the config files to enable HTTPS redirects.

Run certbot and allow automatic config changes:

sudo certbot --apache

Run certbot for certificates only and don't allow it to alter config files:

sudo certbot certonly --apache

The Certbot packages on your system come with a cron job or systemd timer that will renew your certificates automatically before they expire. You will not need to run Certbot again unless you change your configuration. You can test automatic renewal for your certificates by running this command:

sudo certbot renew --dry-run

Now, test your domains by going to https://example.com.

To enable better security on your server, you'll need to enable a basic firewall. For Ubuntu, we'll use the uncomplicated firewall.

Now, add the following rules to the firewall allow SSH, Apache, and HTTP(S) connections. If you need to, you can enable different ports for specifics applications, SFTP, etc.

sudo ufw default deny incoming
sudo ufw default allow outgoing
sudo ufw allow OpenSSH
sudo ufw allow Apache
sudo ufw allow proto tcp from any to any port 80,443

Once you've added all the rules you need, enable the firewall.

sudo ufw enable

If you run into any issues during your VPS set-up, be sure to walk back through your actions and make sure you didn't miss any steps.

Many websites have fantastic guides to setting up various web servers. This is one of the areas where DigitalOcean shines. For simpler or more Linux-oriented questions, I suggest using [Linuxize] (https://linuxize.com).

If you're getting certain errors (e.g. 500 Internal Server Error) and need to debug locally, you can view the access.log and error.log files in the /var/log/apache/ directory.