Web server & mailman are pretty straightforward, even with a fairly large
number of domains.  Once you get the first one done, you can pretty much
cut & paste to generate the rest of the configs with unique DocumentRoots,
or however you're structuring things.  Make sure to use apache2's "conf.d"
style.

The one thing that raised a red flag for me is the "mail server and
accounts".  Are you talking about receiving mail on your custom domain?
Getting mail servers secure, dealing with SPAM & virus protection, are both
huge issues.  That's one place where I would never go back to self-hosted.
Getting mail hosted via a Google Apps domain is the way to go for
single-user cases.

Or, if you're just talking about sending mail (i.e. mailman-esque) then you
can self-host this without too many issues.

Last piece of advice is make sure you're running a firewall on the server.
I recommend ufw for it's simplicity (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UFW)
 If your host is Amazon AWS, you do get some firewalling included, which is
also nice.

Lots of people seem to use linode for exactly what you describe.  Have you
looked at them?  https://www.linode.com/pricing

Another choice for "toy domains" is to run the VM on any other machines you
happen to have, and host directly from that.  That's what I do for several
of my domains to save on cost when I don't really care about uptime
(although the uptime is generally good on my home network connection)

Happy to answer any other admin questions offline if you'd like.

Steve


On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 1:34 PM, Urs Liska <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm in (some) need for feedback regarding the complexity of (web) server
> administration. I am running a "virtual private server", which is a
> virtual machine in a server of an ISP's server farm. So I "own" root
> access to a full Debian installation, with all responsibility for it but
> also all possibilities.
>
> This server is "managed" by Plesk, a comprehensive server administration
> tool. This has probably helped me a lot getting everything to run in the
> first place, but by now I'm rather annoyed by the fact that it does so
> many things "the Plesk way" instead of sticking to proven Linux ways. It
> significantly interferes with domain and web server management, provides
> its own mechanism to install "apps" etc. As a result it obscures away
> tons of things and makes it very hard to find documentation and
> assistance for more or less default tasks such as configuring virtual
> hosts on Apache (to make web apps like Gitlab work).
>
> By now I'm so annoyed that I consider changing this and "falling back"
> to a plain Linux server. But OTOH I'm reluctant to do so because then I
> would *have* to do everything on my own, presumably all on the command
> line and without the convenient web interface. So is anybody able to
> give me an estimate how big the risks are that I end up with a system
> that doesn't do what I need at all? Well, the basic things I'd need to
> set up properly are
> - web server
> - a small number of domains and a bigger number of subdomains
> - mail server and accounts
> - mailman
> This is what I would rely on having set up more or less instantly in
> order to avoid outage. Everything else, from Git server and LilyPond
> building over dynamic DNS or whatever could wait and accept to be more
> hassle-like.
>
> I am by now a rather seasoned Linux user, having installed, maintained
> and used my installations on several computers for nearly 10 years. I
> have administered my current server through the SSH console to some
> extent already. But of course I'm far from being a competent sysadmin.
>
> I know this is extremely hard to tell for anyone else. But maybe you
> *do* have some comments for me that might help me deciding whether to go
> in that direction or not.
>
> Best
> Urs
>
> --
> Urs Liska
> www.openlilylib.org
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> lilypond-user mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
>
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