A virtual private server (VPS, also referred to as Virtual Dedicated Server or VDS) is a method of splitting a server. Each virtual server can run its own full-fledged operating system, and each server can be independently rebooted.

The practice of partitioning a single server so that it appears as multiple servers has long been common practice in mainframe computers, but has seen a resurgence lately with the development of virtualization software and technologies for other architectures.

What are the benefits of using VPS ?

It is faster that shared hosting, so putting this to simple words your websites will work & load faster with VPS. You will have full control of your system plus many other benefits.

My hosting history

I start with cheap shared hosting but after sometime I moved all my sites to VPS. I was testing many companies for long time but from almost 2 years I am using slicehost and I am pretty happy with them.

In this post I try to show you howto setup good VPS hosting server and use it for your websites. It was written by my friend Dru who helped me setup my VPS and I think it will be a good howto for all of you.

Basic Details:

• VPS Hosting Company: Slicehost
• WebServer: LiteSpeed

When I am starting new project, website I need to create couple of things:

1. Create user

a.) create a user using webmin

- Click on System in the sidebar, then on users and groups
- Click on create new user
- for the username ALWAYS use the domain name for the name of the user. So in this case: example.org do the same for the group (choose new group and name it the same way – THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT)
- then click save

When you create the user in webmin there should be a field where you can set the group, that will let you pick the www-data group before you create the user.

b.) shell method (i prefered this method)

I use this one: adduser username –ingroup www-data –force-badname

where username = whatever you want the user to be called, ie

adduser example.org –ingroup www-data –force-badname

2. Create LiteSpeed folders

Now you need to FTP in (don’t use ssh or sftp it has to be ftp). (use the server ip, the username will be whatever you called the user and the password will be whatever you configured)

Once you’ve done that create the following folders: config public_html cgi-bin

3. New site in LiteSpeed

Login to litespeed http://your_IP/index.php (user: **** password: ****)

Go to configuration, then virtualhost templates.
Click on PHP_SuEXEC

Where it says Member Virtual Hosts click the add link to the right of it, then fill in the following:

- virtualhost name – should be the domain name (example.org)
- domain name – should be the same as the above
- aliases – should be the same as the above except with www. at the start (www.example.org)
- virtualhost root – Leave Blank

Save, and then go to actions and graceful restart to restart the webserver.

FTP your files into the public_html folder and you should be able to access them in your browser.

4. Importing Databases

when you move website between hostings

First create a blank database with phpmyadmin.

Then in the commandline, navigate to the folder where the sql file is. Then do this command:

mysql -u user -p user_dbname < file.sql

where dbname = name of the blank database
where file.sql = the SQL file you're importing.

It will ask you for the root password and then in a few seconds it'll be done.

5. BONUS TIPS & TRICKS

a.) How to move files when migrating to new server ?

On old server backup files with tar, you use one command line to backup all files to one tar or tar.gz file.

Put this file in public_html folder on this server. Next go to new server and:

wget link_to_the_gzip_file_on_the_old_server

Next untar the files to proper place and that is it.

b.) Problem with file permissions

Sometimes when i move files from one server to another i got problems with file permissions on new server. To fix I use this method:

cd /home/example.org

and then do

chown -R example.org:www-data public_html

and then

chmod 770 -R public_html.

c.) MySQL problem with coding, default charset

Sometimes i got problem (Wordpress UTF-8 Charset Woes) with coding in sql base, there was strange coding problems in text and i need to fix that. I use this solution:

$ mysql –user=frog -p –execute=”DROP DATABASE dbname;
CREATE DATABASE dbname CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;”

$ mysql –user=frog –max_allowed_packet=16M -p –default-character-set=utf8 dbname < dump_utf8.sql

and it works for me..

To find more about this one look here: Convert latin1 to UTF-8 in MySQL

So good luck with great hosting Slicehost and webserver LiteSpeed, for me it works really great for almost 2 years now!

When you see blank page with your WordPress blog you can use my tips to find bug and fix that annoying problem.

1. Turn off all plugins

If you have access to your admin panel you do it from there but if don’t you can always ‘ftp’ your website and move all your plugins to other directory so there will be no plugins active.

2. Change theme to another one (refresh/check)

Remember to turn off cache plugins if you use them, clear your cache.

3. Creates or/and update .htaccess file

You can browse it by linux console for example. If you don’t know how to use ’ssh’ try to read a little bit on google about it. You can use free Putty software to ssh your files on server.

4. Edit and save post, permalinks…. stuff like that

Update your permalink structure. Just click update in WordPress, don’t change it to other structure, this can be really bad for SEO.

5. Update to newest version of WordPress

6. Check what PHP version you have

@Mittineague said: For PHP errors, I find the easiest way to trouble-shoot when developing a plugin is to make a direct HTTP request for the file. eg domain.com/blog_dir/wp-content/plugins/pluginfile.php
This way will show syntax errors and other PHP error messages.
When the file is OK PHP-wise, you will then see errors like
[WordPress-function name here] not found.
For incompatibility problems though, deactivating and reactivating is the best way, especially now that WordPress “sand boxes” and will show a “could not be activated” message.
And don’t learn the hard way. Back-up, back-up, back-up!

7. Check this out:

WordPress should compress articles (gzip) if browsers ask for them… in my situation this fix my blank page error

8. Check error logs

To find something interesting about your problem try to look for http error log and you will see there which file causes errors.

9. wp-config.php

Edit wp-config.php file (which is WordPress main configuration file) and look for blank lines in the end, sometimes text editors add this line and it can broke WordPress installation.

10. Delete all Akismet spam comments

You can read more about it: Solution for Wordpress blank admin page

Point 7 helps me with my CSS gallery.

In the meantime I generate problems with SilenBits and it was blank too….I’ve solved the problem using this fix: Change theme to another one (refresh/check)

So good luck and no WordPress blank pages for you !

• Blog: LiteSpeed WebServer on Slicehost VPS

WordPress Theme:

• You can find theme that we use on this site on Web-kreation portal.

Features:

• Customized free WordPress theme
• 125×125 ads support
• Hosting on our VPS server
• Using free WordPress plugins
• RSS using FeedBurner
• Google Analytics Statistics

Website is up2date with WordPress version and all plugins are in newest versions.

Blog Stats:

• 1,366 posts
• 491 comments
• 27 categories and 5 tags

Spam:

• Akismet has protected your site from 22,475 spam comments

Features:

• Customized free WordPress theme
• Hosting on our VPS server
• Using free WordPress plugins
• RSS using FeedBurner
• Adsense Implementation
• Google Analytics Statistics

Website is up2date with WordPress version and all plugins are in newest versions.

WordPress Theme:

• Original K2 WordPress theme can be found on JohnTP blog

Blog Stats:

• 439 posts
• 1,635 comments
• 39 categories and 377 tags

Spam:

• Akismet has protected your site from 116,897 spam comments

Features:

• Customized free WordPress theme
• Hosting on our VPS server
• Using free WordPress plugins
• RSS using FeedBurner
• Adsense Implementation
• Google Analytics Statistics

Website is up2date with WordPress version and all plugins are in newest versions.

Blog Stats:

• 967 posts
• 3,386 comments
• 52 categories

Spam:

• Akismet has protected your site from 65,203 spam comments

Features:

• Customized free WordPress theme
• Hosting on our VPS server
• Using free WordPress plugins
• RSS using FeedBurner
• Adsense Implementation
• Google Analytics Statistics

Website is up2date with WordPress version and all plugins are in newest versions.

WordPress Theme:

• You can find original WordPress theme searching : Aqua-Soft Forums

Blog Stats:

• 4,528 posts
• 1,644 comments
• 76 categories

Spam:

• Akismet has protected your site from 40,998 spam comments

Features:

• Customized free WordPress theme
• Hosting on our VPS server
• Using free WordPress plugins
• RSS using FeedBurner
• Adsense Implementation
• Google Analytics Statistics

Website is up2date with WordPress version and all plugins are in newest versions.

WordPress Theme:

• You can find it and see the original version: Tigerpress: A Free Wordpress Theme

Looking at actual iTunes Skins portal you can see how we changed it, how many plugins we implemented to make it more appealing for visitors.

Wordpress Theme Tweaks:

• Upgrade WordPress footer with special addons

Features:

• Based on free WordPress theme
• Hosting on our VPS server
• Using free WordPress plugins
• RSS using FeedBurner
• Adsense Implementation
• Google Analytics Statistics

Website is up2date with WordPress version and all plugins are in newest versions.

We want to reach something like this.

You can see live preview here: Ideal WordPress Footer and you can decide whether you want to have something like this on your blog.

Basically we have 3 parts for this project:

• ‘Sharing is sexy’ plugin
• Author page
• Related post with thumbnails

It’s simple to apply on your own blog but if you have any questions let me know. This soultions works for me so it must work for you as well.

‘Sharing is sexy’

This is very simple to install and the effect in my opinion is amazing.

First you need to go to this location: sexybookmarks and click ‘Download’ button. This is a simple WordPress plugin that you need to upload to your WordPress server and activate using admin panel.

Next you setup your networks and other options using WordPress admin panel. ‘Sharing is sexy’ functionality will appear automatically, you can choose if you want to see it on homepage or only in posts, pages.

If you want to put your bookmarks manually use this code in your theme:

<?php if(function_exists('selfserv_sexy')) { selfserv_sexy(); } ?>

and setup this one using plugin admin page:

Menu Location (in relevance to content):
Above Content | Below Content | Manual Mode

It will work, trust me.

Author page

This is also pretty cool and looks very nice on blogs. To setup this one I use this link: Displaying Author Pic and Bio in Your Wordpress Post the Non-Gravatar Way but I made some modifications.

I use static text message ‘about me‘ and put it direct to my WordPress theme code. It means that I took css code from link above and use this php code in my actual theme:

<div class="authbio">
<img src="your_photo_url/images/sample.jpg" alt="" class="alignleft"/>
Put static text in wordpress theme with html tags like <strong> etc...
</div>


CSS code that i’ve added to my theme style.css is:

.authbio{
color: #666;
font-weight: normal;
background: #fff;
border: 1px solid #ccc;
width: 420px;
height:60px;
padding: 8px;
margin-bottom:5px;
}

and this one for image:

img.alignleft {
float:left;
background-color: #fff;
border:1px solid #ccc;
padding: 4px;
margin: 0 7px 2px 0;
display: inline;
}

After small CSS changes it looks like this:

Related post with thumbnails

We need plugin that will match related posts and add preview images to them.

First step is download and active this plugin: YARPP and then use tips from this article:
Display Thumbnails For Related Posts in Wordpress.

You need to add this php code to your theme:

<?php if (function_exists('related_posts')){ ?>
<?php related_posts();?>
<?php }?>

Download Related Post Template File from link above and put it to plugins directory and add propere CSS code to your style.css

/* Related Posts */
ol.related-posts {clear:both; text-align:center; margin:10px 0px 0px 0px; padding:0;}
ol.related-posts li{width:120px; float:left; display:inline; margin-right:15px;; padding:0;}
ol.related-posts img{clear:both; padding:5px; background:#F7F7F7; border:1px solid #DDD;}
ol.related-posts a{clear:both; display:block; border:none; text-decoration:none;}
ol.related-posts li{font-size:12px;}

Then all you need to do is activate new tempalte with plugin admin page.

If you have problems let me know, I can help you .. it is pretty easy to implement using link above. Remember that you need to manually add post thumbnails to your posts using custom fields after you setup everything.

You can read more about this website update and tweaking footer and other WordPress stuff :

• iTunes Skins – Web site update Part I
• iTunes Skins – Web site update Part II

Good luck and hope to see some implementation of my ideas in future.