Build Your Own Server Tutorial
20 May
Several people have asked me how I moved Mister Nifty over to Rackspace Cloud Servers. It’s not as easy as a shared hosting environment because you have to build your own server. In the following screencasts, I will show you how easy it is to create a server, a database, and install WordPress in under 15 minutes. The tutorial does not include server security or DNS mapping for your domain, but it’s enough to get your feet wet with web servers.
The first thing you need to do is open an account with Rackspace Cloud Servers. A server running 512MB with 10GB of space will run you about $20-$25/month. You pay for the bandwidth you use. So, if you have a low traffic site, your costs will stay low.
Next, watch the following screencasts to setup your server:
- Create the server, setup the LAMP server (Linux/Apache/MYSQL/PHP) and install phpmyadmin (database management software)
- Navigate to the web directory, link phpmyadmin to the web directory, create a database with username and password for WordPress
- Install and configure WordPress
In under 15 minutes you can have a full-blown WordPress site running on your brand new server!
To map your domains you will need to check out this tutorial about virtual hosts if you wish to use more than one domain on your server. You will also need to add your DNS to Rackspace by selecting your server and clicking the DNS tab. Your configuration should look something like this: http://d.pr/DC4x You will need to change out the IP for your own server IP. Finally, you will need to point the @ record of your domain’s DNS to the IP of your server. This can be done where you purchased your domain name.
Again, this tutorial is meant to be a beginners guide to building a server. There are many distributions of Linux. I’ve selected Ubuntu because it’s what I’m familiar with. If you have any questions or suggestions please place them in the comments below.
