I have limited server management skills, having always used cPanel / WHM hosting accounts or a host with a reasonable control panel. Years ago I tried setting up a VPS with Virtualmin / DirectAdmin and I never really got that comfortable with it. I currently have about a dozen sites, mostly wordpress, that I’ve hosted on a reseller account. While using a reseller does take care of 99% of my headaches, I always felt there was some sort of compromise. The servers never really felt as fast and responsive as what I like. It was becoming more problematic at my current host and I again started to explore options.
I was debating trying the virtualmin route again and I saw that many people were liking openlitespeed with cyberpanel. I basically want a control panel to manage DNS settings. If it has a simple install for wordpress, that’s a bonus – which cyberpanel has. I figured if there was a VPS that had a pre-packaged install, I’d give it a try. And here we are.
I considered DigitalOcean, Linode, and ultimately went with Vultr. They all seem to have what amounts to a two month free trial and are probably all pretty comparable.
Vultr does have a one click installation of cyberpanel, which includes openlitespeed. I really don’t need anything fancy and cyberpanel so far seems to have worked out pretty well. I basically created an account and clicked to deploy a new server. I selected the “Cloud Compute” vCPU option which currently starts at $3.50 / month. I chose to use the newer CPU’s, which brings the price up to $6/month and then added the automatic backups for another $1.20, bringing my monthly total to $7.20 / month. Under “server image”, I selected “Marketplace” and they have a ton of options, including cyberpanel on Ubuntu 20.04.
The server was ready in about a minute. I usually hate having to use a terminal program with SSH to handle direct server commands. Vultr, and I know digitalocean too, has a website link to enter console mode, which lets you SSH into your server without having to configure putty or something similar. I clicked the link for console, got a message about finishing the install, and then I entered the recommended command to get my password for cyberpanel.
I think went to the https://<host-name-or-IP>:8090 and that took my to the cyberpanel login page. I logged in, and created an account, starting with this domain. Once I created the website in cyberpanel, I then clicked on “manage” and one of the options is to install wordpress.
I clicked to install wordpress and… I got a 404 error. Not cool.
It’s unclear why some installs are having this issue, but fortunately, with a little research I was able to find the solution, which did involve logging in to the console again and typing some ugly commands. The one that was needed was:
sudo apt-get install php-mysql
After I did that, I got an error that the directory was not empty. Since I hadn’t set-up anything yet, I went ahead and deleted the website from the cyberpanel account, and then created a new one. This time when I went to “manage” and install wordpress, it worked!!
So now I have a quick running site and the ability to add more wordpress sites to the same account. I will have to see how well the smallest server can handle multiple sites. As I generally use cloudflare and most of the sites are pretty static, I’m hoping that there won’t be a resource issue. I’ll know more once I add some more sites and see how the server handles the load.