Going to Dedicated... where do I start

[Canadian]

My business has been growing and it is time to move on from a shared hosting account.  I have been using hosting.com and they have suggested an Enterprise Cloud solution.  The upside to this is my site will no longer be crashing (due to traffic) because the new hosting plan will be able to handle the load... the downside is the entire system has to be self managed.

 

I have been doing front end development for years.  I'm quite comfortable in that environment.  However, I know nothing about back-end development.  For example I have no idea where to begin with things like allocating resources, keeping things secure etc. 

 

Can anyone point me in a direction on where I could learn about these things?  For example... are there any good books that would teach me how to manage my own hosting account?

 

I'm pretty sure I'll be using MySQL, PHP, and Linux.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks

[kicken]

There are some places that offer managed dedicated hosting, which will give you a dedicated box but they will still take care of any software setup or configuration you need, just gotta contact them and tell you what you want done.  This usually costs a bit more but for someone knew to the game it offers a nice fallback in case your either not comfortable doing it yourself or mess something up.

 

Cheaper plans will be unmanaged which generally means the most your host will do for you is a system format or reboot, everything else is up to you.

 

As far as learning, pick up a few books about linux administration.  I don't know of any in particular to recommend but I've had good experiences in general with any book published by O'Reilly so you could try there.  To practice you can download a virtual machine program such as VirtualBox and setup a linux distro similar to whatever is on your dedicated host.  Then if you want to make some change on your host you can make a few attempts at it on your virtual machine before hand until you get it right and figure out the process.

 

[Canadian]

Thank you very much for the information.  I have one last question.  Perhaps hosting.com isn't the best hosting company for my situation.  Are there any good ones you would recommend that offer managed dedicated solutions?

 

Thanks again for your time,

 

Chris

[xylex]

You say that you don't know much about the backend, so do you know anything about your traffic patterns or what's causing your performance issues currently?  If not, it'd definitely be worth hiring a developer to spend some time checking things out.  I have no experience with hosting.com and I'm certainly not saying that they're a bad host, but almost every host that I've dealt with has always said the site will just magically be faster if I moved to a more expensive solution, regardless of if that would really solve any issues.

 

Often with shared hosting you're stuck on a very oversold server and your site is slowing down because of other activity on the server unrelated to you, so moving to a similar plan at a more scrupulous hosting company could solve the issue.  And many times throwing more hardware at a bottleneck in the application that you're running isn't necessarily going to fix the problem - for example if you're heavily querying large unindexed database tables.

[QuickOldCar]

I'm in no way affiliated to them.

 

http://www.limestonenetworks.com/ had to be my best host ever.

 

Had a dedicated quad core with 8 gig memory and unlimited uploads.

 

It never had down time in 3 years I used them and was extremely fast, the support was great and they will contact you within a short time if have any questions.

 

Here's a for instance on my experience renting a dedicated server from them.

 

You order the server, specify which operating system would like, which panel, and any other preferences, usually within the day they will give you an address for the server and credentials to log in. I usually install webmin for a panel, pretty sure they offer cpanel as an option, but i don't care for it.

 

At this point everything should be good to go from them, they use snapshots. There still will be any configuration you may want.

At their website when you log in, they have a panel to associate your domain to your server.

 

My first choice I selected centos, and installed hypervm with kloxo on it, it's a free opensource hosting solution that can rent virtual dedicated servers, or vps's if you want to, or just nice for creating more sites yourself. Maybe can recoup some of your costs with friends or someone you know that needs a server space.

 

Check out the demo of the panel.

 

After 2 years using centos, I needed ubuntu, I wasn't hosting sites for others that server and had a need for ubuntu to install certain packages at that time for a project was involved in.

 

I surely missed the hypervm, and then had just a plain old server lacking many of the great features the hosting package provided. And to set up a server with all the features is just way too time consuming, and also troublesome at times.

 

I would surely still be using them if not for the fact I have a friend hosting that server in NYC on a fios line.

[Piriz]

You could find some companies that manage the server for you like hostgator.

[freelance84]

 

Are you sure you need a full dedicated server? I needed better control of a server for a project once and researched into private clouds and dedicated... For what i needed a cloud sufficed and was a fair bit cheaper, especially if you go for unmanaged.. but then it depends how much time you have.

 

I was also brand new to configuring a server and decided to go with Ubuntu. I found that a lo of the guides on the net had a few holes or were just for specific bits so i put together a complete guide to remind me for later of everything i needed (obviously aimed for the complete novice, as i was not even that when i stared )

 

http://webconfiguration.blogspot.com/2011/10/beginners-guide-to-setting-up-ubuntu.html

 

I'm from the UK and I prefer rackspace. However Fasthosts is not bad, and slightly cheaper as rackspace charge per gig downloaded on top of the server rent. They have a pretty solid backup facility, but then i think Fasthosts does too. Rackspace is a US company too though, where a fasthosts is english.