Many people have asked me over the years for assistance setting up a website. I’m no expert in hosting one, and until now never took the time to learn. It took my girlfriend asking for help to make me seriously consider assisting instead of pointing to a company that specializes in web hosting. Only time will tell if we made the right decision in self-managing our own domains and servers. At least I will have learned a lot by the end of this journey, whenever that may be.
Since I already had a VPS (Virtual Private Server) that I use daily, and some experience with Linux administration I can thank a previous employer for allowing me to learn with, I was able to extrapolate and iterate on those past experiences. I definitely wanted to tackle it using open-source tools, and it only took a tiny bit of effort to get started thanks to the guides offered by Digital Ocean and Linode.
For Linux, I prefer Debian because I’m familiar with it and it’s one of the most widely known distributions of Linux available. I needed to need to install a set of packages on Linux, called Apache, MySQL (Maria db), and PHP2. This is a guide I wrote afterward, and I hope to be able to follow it to success again in the future.