Hosting

TL;DR why and how to setup a mail-server Why setup a server If you’re like me you’ve never put much thought into your email, and you simply use a free provider. I see three main reasons to take an alternative approach Security: Email is the backup for every other online account, and this should be in your control as much as possible. Privacy: Everything sent and received on a free provider can be read and (generally) used to target advertisements to you Customisation: With an alternative approach you can have your own address (tom@libreengineer.com instead of tom@genericprovider.com) The server Our mail server has to run somewhere. In an ideal (privacy) world, this would be on self managed hardware. However as this is the first time I’ve tried to put together a mail server I’d like to separate the potential software problems from the potential hardware problems. I achieved this with an Amazon Web Services (AWS) 1GB Lightsail instance. Debian was choses as the operating sysem as the tutorial I use recommends it. It also fits nicely with my desired for long-term stability, and free and open source software. ...

One of the unique features of Amazon Lightsail is its browser-based SSH client, which makes it very simple to get a remote ssh connection to our server. This browser-based client has been serving me very well. However there is an undesirable aspect, which is that the client will time-out if not used for a few minutes. This was enough of a push for me to install a proper terminal. Which has taken the form of installing Ubuntu (a distribution of GNU/Linux) onto my laptop and utilising the default terminal. ...

Now that my, new, Lightsail server is up and running, it’s time to put it to good use, by installing the Ghost publishing (blogging) platform. This guide is adapted from the Ghost documentation. For simplicity Ghost has only one recommended stack (server configuration), which I’ve chosen to implement: Ubuntu long term support (LTS) 16.04LTS or 18.04LTS (as at 2018) as the operating system MySQL as the database nginx (minimum version 1.9.5 for SSL) as the webserver systemd Node (Recommended version installed via NodeSource) for server-side scripting A server with at least 1GiB memory (RAM + swap) A (non-root) user for running Ghost command line interface (CLI) commands a (non-root) user: [user] Which we’ll use to run all our commands. ...

Since my initial blog-server setup, Amazon Web Services (AWS) have introduced a simple, low cost server option through Lightsail. Everything you need to jumpstart your project on AWS — compute, storage, and networking — for a low, predictable price. The lowest-cost Lightsail option is $USD3.50/month and cheaper than my current EC2 setup (t2.micro) which is $0.0116/hour or ~$8.352/month. Although the Lightsail option has half the memory (0.5GiB vs. 1.0GiB). So given that Lightsail is designed to be simpler to setup and use, and is cheaper, I thought I’d use it as the base for the transition to a ghost blog. It’s not certain, but the ghost documentation looks like a 0.5GiB will be enough for the server (assuming this blog doesn’t become a run-away success). ...

tl;dr a simple guide to setting up a LAMP stack on an existing Ubuntu server. For my purposes I’m referring to LAMP as: L inux (Ubuntu LTS): Operating system A pache: webserver M ySQL: database P HP: scripting language Linux: see alternate post Apache: Install Apache from the Ubuntu repositories $ sudo apt-get install apache2 Configure Apache to start automatically $ sudo systemctl enable apache2 $ sudo systemctl start apache2 $ sudo systemctl status apache2 Test Apache by opening the server IP address in a web-browser server_ip If everything went as expected you should see a generic page describing the Apache install and configuration files. ...

tl;dr A quick guide on how to setup an AWS EC2 instance (server) and connect to it via ssh using PuTTY on Windows. This is a quick post on the key steps needed to setup a internet accessible server (computer) running on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, which we’ll later use to run dedicated applications on. We’ll also access and configure this server through the secure shell (ssh) protocol. ...

So I’ve decided to take the plunge into the world of blogging and website hosting. My initial motivation to venture into this world is to have a nice format to publish reviews of books I read. My secondary motivation being to learn the details associated with setting up and hosting websites. An initial search of website options led me to WordPress as the best option for a self-hosted website, and a fee other options for non-self-hosted websites (e.g. Blogger, Squarespace, WordPress.com). Seeing the benefit in learning the nuts and bolts that sit behind the website, I decided to go down the, self-hosted, WordPress path. ...