Build your own VPS in the cloud

Written by: Phil Sturgeon

Hello, I am Phil and I have been developing websites since 1999. I started my career freelancing then ran a small web development team for over a year. Now I work as a developer for HargreavesLansdown and use my spare time to develop, write articles about programming and create slightly intoxicated screencasts. For more of my antics follow me on twitter @PhilSturgeon.

After getting fed up with a clunky old VPS running a borked copy of CentOS 5 I decided I wanted more control, a better OS, cheaper running costs and better reliability. Watch my screencast on how to set up an Ubuntu 8.04 cloud web server to serve your content over the web.

I looked into a few options and decided on Mosso to be my cloud server providers. This comes down to many reason: they are cheap, they are a Rackspace company so they are running very reliable hardware and they recently absorbed Slicehost, so you know their control panels are good.

With my hosting providers found, I had to pick my software. I decided to use Virtualmin as there is a free alternative that does basically everything you need from a VPS GUI and saves me the cost of paying for cPanel/WHM.

This decision restricted my choice of Operating System a little, as sadly the newest version of Ubuntu that Virtualmin supports is 8.04 LTS. Thats good enough for me, and LTS means more applications will worry about supporting it.

Anyhow, enough of that. Time to see my slightly drunken screencast in action.

Part 1

Part 2

Tell us what you think !