OS And packages recommendation

Ryan111 · 29 Oct 2014 at 11:36

Hello guys, looking some help with choosing what operating system to use on my new Kimsufi KS3.

The things I need to be able to do on it;
- run a minecraft server for ~10 players
- run around 5 different websites (all basic Wordpress sites)
- run crashplan or owncloud so I can back up my WHS to it
- be relatively easy to set up and maintain
- run a vpn from it

That's about it for the minute,

Specs of the server are;
i3 2130 3.4GHz
8GB Ram (shows 7.7GB in Ubuntu)
2TB HDD

It's currently running Ubuntu Server 12.04 "Precise Pangolin" LTS (64bits) with Java installed.

Would Ubuntu be the best way of running the above programs? I've set up Remote Desktop and Ubuntu desktop on it so it's easier for me to configure as I'm a bit of a Linux newby.

What packages should I install to help me manage the websites? I need to be able to run at least 5.

Thanks

Ryan

Steveocee · 29 Oct 2014 at 12:34

If it was myself, I'd go with Ubuntu but stretch your neck out a little and go for a server build.
Ubuntu-Server has at install the option to add a LAMP so thats your websites covered in that.

Try spinning up a virtualbox machine, CLI isnt as scary as you'd think....

El Pew · 29 Oct 2014 at 13:08

LAMP would work for a bunch of Wordpress sites.

If you're up for more of a challenge you might want to consider running Nginx instead, Ars did a great series on how to set up a decent web server on Ubuntu: http://arstechnica.com/series/web-served/

Ryan111 · 29 Oct 2014 at 14:19

As I said earlier it's running Ubuntu Server ATM, I installed lamp last night and I've got the "It works!" Page. How do I go about adding more sites etc? Also, would I be able to set limits on sites storage, say 10GB each or something? A couple of the sites are for friends and don't want them taking the **** and filling like 100GB etc

Frozennova · 29 Oct 2014 at 14:21

Virtualmin is certainly a must for me.

It will make setting up Web hosting for multiple sites, email,ftp,dns etc a doddle. It also allows quotas, plans etc

El Pew · 29 Oct 2014 at 14:48

Ryan111 said:
As I said earlier it's running Ubuntu Server ATM, I installed lamp last night and I've got the "It works!" Page. How do I go about adding more sites etc? Also, would I be able to set limits on sites storage, say 10GB each or something? A couple of the sites are for friends and don't want them taking the **** and filling like 100GB etc

You need to look in to how Apache works, then. It's pretty simple to have multiple websites, you just have multiple folders in your htdocs location (e.g /var/apache/htdocs/site1, /var/apache/htdocs/site2 etc), then access each site by going to http://<hostname>/site1 or http://<hostname>/site2

Limiting space usage will be a lot more tricky because it depends whether you're talking actual filesystem space, or database size. You could do something like set up a fixed size filesystem per site, with a fixed size MySQL database for each, but I doubt Wordpress would be able to gracefully handle situations where one or other fills up.