Forum Moderators: mack
(I shut down one site - an investment-related community site - when my "real job" took up too much time for me to continue to maintain it. I sold the domain where I ran one of the first outdoor webcams a little over a year ago, in response to a generous unsolicited offer. You could still get some pretty decent domain names in 1995...)
I am a software engineer, with nearly 30 years experience, and I have some professional web development background, in addition to working on my own sites. I'm pretty comfortable in a Linux shell.
I have several ideas for websites I want to develop, and so I got a Xen-based virtual server package. It's the closest thing to a dedicated server (as I have root access to my virtual server) at a very reasonable price. I don't think I'd feel comfortable without the flexibility that this offers. (e.g. I HAVE to run my own Apache server, as I'm prone to writing my own modules...) I figure it will be easy to move to a dedicated server, should I outgrow that.
Anyway, this thing comes with DirectAdmin. Somehow, I wasn't expecting that - I figured I'd be dumped into a a shell and have to cope from there, and I'd get "some web-based thingie to reboot with."
I've never used DirectAdmin or any of the similar "control panels". Do I want this? Do I want to just ignore it? How much does it get in the way? (Can I still edit Apache config files and system config files? How do I know what DirectAdmin will and won't touch?) If I move to a dedicated server later, do I want to install (or have the host install) DirectAdmin on it?
I could just set up all of my domains under the "admin" account. But I've always liked the idea of running each domain as a seperate user. That's the way I'd set it up myself anyway. Seems prudent - don't let some runaway activity on one domain get access to another domain's files.
So, I decided to set up seperate users for each domain, and let DirectAdmin set them up for me. Any good reason for me to set up a reseller? Maybe would make some sense if I had a group of related domains.
At this point, it's just a "play" system, and I can delete domains and users and start over, or even get a full reload of the system if I don't like the way I've set it up, since I have no content up yet.
I guess what I am looking for is some general comments on the usefulness or non-usefullness of DirectAdmin on a system that will be used strictly for my own sites, as well as some pointers on how to take the greatest control of my server without stepping on DirectAdmin's toes. As well as any handy "gotchas" or mistakes to avoid that can't be easily fixed later.
I have used this one quite a few of my local servers and never had any problems with it. You need to spend a little time getting it set up and configured correctly, but once you have done this it works like a dream.
Mack.
Mack.
