If you are not familiar with Linode, they are a provider of VPS (Virtual Private Servers) which is basically a semi-private version of shared hosting. You generally don’t have to share the box with hundreds of other people and even if you do you are guaranteed a certain share of the resources (CPU / RAM / etc). Not to mention the server hardware itself is extremely beast as far as power. You are in your own little private eco-system meaning you and only you have access to your machine (or slice of a machine rather). You will not experience the same horrible load times and transfer rates that you would get at companies like Go Daddy and Dreamhost (shudder). The only down side is you do not have a CPanel or Plesk panel (though you can install one if you wish, but I do not use them and will not go into that here) so you have to install and manage everything yourself. It’s not as hard as you might think if you can get used to searching Google and reading a lot of tutorials.

Command line can be a tricky beast for beginners, this blog aims to help ease some of that pain by sharing the procedures that I usually take when setting up my web server. Please be advised that with every new version of Linux the steps can vary a bit due to packages being upgraded or removed from the repositories.

This guide focuses on configuring the latest and greatest (at the time of this article) version of Ubuntu on a freshly provisioned Linode server. The exact system specs do not matter that much, you can use the lowest 1G plan if you like, the steps will be the same. I’m using the 2G plan that costs $20 a month. You can check out Linode’s prices and decide for yourself.

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