Forum Moderators: mack
I'm not new to web development, but I'm about to make my fist leap to a dedicated server. Is it pretty much self explanatory (using CPanel, which I've always thought was pretty easy), or are there some not-so-obvious things I should be aware of?
Any tips would be greatly appreciated.
You may find you are renting the server in toto, and as such you are responsible for EVERYTHING in which case monitor your logs for unathorised access, protect your root/administrator access accounts and so on.
Matt
Mack.
Buy a hardware firewall and lock all ports.
I'm gald you mentioned this. I was wondering if the whole rent-a-firewall thing was a scam. I figured a server on one of these massive networks had to be behind a firewall whether you liked it or not.
But if you guys say so, I'll get one.
If you have some old hardware lying about you might want to try and build a clone of the server your host runs, not really a hardware clone, but a clone on terms of software. This will allow you to practice in a non-mission critical environment.
That's a great idea!
I'm not new to web development, but I'm about to make my fist leap to a dedicated server. Is it pretty much self explanatory (using CPanel, which I've always thought was pretty easy), or are there some not-so-obvious things I should be aware of?
I don't mean to sound negative, but you might be in for a lot of work that you don't want if you're running a dedicated server by yourself.
The security issues are constant. If you're only running your own site on the server, it's not so bad. However, you need to keep up with patches for the server and patches for any popular software you might decide to run as well.
You can buy a server adminstration book that is 2 inches thick. You'll likely have to start hanging out on server adminstration forums to keep up with the latest issues.
There are a ton of shared hosting environments that are extremely insecure. Full control of a server allows you to take the security into your own hands. As a self-taught server admin, the more I learned, the less I wanted to be a server admin.
You'll want full backups to keep at regular intervals, and want to keep all of them. Servers are often compromised long before anyone notices, and then you need serious experts to figure out how and when the breach happened, and to know that there are not kits installed. I sure enjoyed the steep learning curve, but I eventually learned enough to not want to do admin servers.
As a beginning... you want a firewall, you want all unused ports locked down, you want to use non-default ports for typical services, and you want to always use some form of ssh when doing adminstrative tasks on the server.
A user-friendly control panel makes some things easy, but server security is a much bigger issue. Even the best server admins wind up with compromised servers at some point or another. They'll tell you that is isn't "if," but "when."
I'm actually reconsidering already after a week of trying to setup my own DNS.
Nothing works according to the documentation, and it's really frustrating.
Thanks again, oneguy!
You can also look into paying someone to do the server admin for you. That can be reasonably priced if you find someone who does that for a living, and there are people out there that do. They would probably have the knowledge to do things like change ports on various services.
And the "not if, but when" thing applies to shared hosting environments even more, particularly since they often use default ports for the convenience of customers, and also have customers that already have some access to the machine, which can be the first step to doing something malicious. But, in that case, the server is always their issue, and you only need to worry about keeping your own files backed up.
Hope you find an option that will work for you.
