I recently acquired a dedicated server at Nocster and my questions are now to those of who who are running your site on a dedicated server, preferably Red Hat/Linux based:

- Do you do your administer the server yourself (shell) or do you use some ready package like cPanel/WHM (the one Nocster offers)?
- What http server do you use?
- Do you write your visitor tracking software yourself or are do you use some ready package? If you do it yourself what technique do you use (PHP, ASP, Java)?
- What email software are you usin? What spam filters?
- How do you follow the general health and status of the server? Bandwidth usage, load etc.?

I am quite experienced in maintaining a server myself but I would rather not do any extra work. However, I found that those ready packages are not very reliable, Apache refused to start after WHM had modified the httpd.conf file. If I have to do manual maintenance I prefer to do it on a clean slate.. And I am worried if those ready services really are that flexible after all. What is your opinion?

I use cobalt raqs- they have a control panel built in, so I don't have to worry about getting a manager. But from what I hear, cPanel is the best- and very reliable. I believe nocster will add that for only 20$/month.

As for tracking, I use Urchin- it's very good!

Cobalt raqs are very easy to keep up to date, because they allow you to install updates from their control panel. The drawback to a raq is that they are only 450 mhz.

Also, I installed pmfirewall manually to block out every port I don't use.

Hope that helps!
Mike

I've managed Linux servers in a number of ways. Until just recently, I hosted my own server and it was just a RH box that I kept up to date with up2date (har). Before that I managed a Debian server (and Debian Linux has the best package/upgrade management, IMHO). This was fine when I was satisfied with SMTP and HTTP only. And even then, the HTTP was static content. I did run a POP3 server on the box too, but that was behind the firewall (no external popping), so I was less worried about keeping up to date on it. I did deploy resin (a Servlet/JSP app server) briefly, but the JVM on my old P2-350 server wasn't really up to snuff, so I moved that serving over to another box inside the firewall and just redirected a port on the firewall to the new box.

If you can stand the signal-to-noise, I highly recommend subscribing to bugtraq and to CERT. Even if you don't, you should track patches against your deployed software with your vendor.

I just recently began the process of decommissioning my local server and replacing it with economy hosting from Verve for the time being. They include cPanel management and I have to say, that's pretty wonderful. After having sweated over all of the menial management and upkeep tasks, I'm happy to let somebody else foot that bill for the time being. I spent 3 days setting up my Linux box several years ago (and I'm an old-hat at server administration). Contrast that to about 30 minutes to get my Verve account configured the way I want -- including the extra mailboxes, the forwards, the CGI, and the site management. Of course, this is all for my personal site -- not my commercial site, which is still hosted locally on one of my servers for the time being. Once I get my commercial content ready, I will probably move it to Verve hosting as well (or some other economical hosting provider). Once I saturate my transfer rate with downloads (which is $4/GB after 40GB), I'll offload that to one of the capable file hosting providers we've discussed here.

To summarize, I've done completely manual management (old-style RedHat). I've used both Debian and RH's auto-update services, but maintained my own software. And I've now used cPanel. I have to say that in terms of ease-of-use, cPanel is pretty nice. My only concern now is a lack of control when it comes to security, however Verve applies security fixes as soon as they're available, so that gives me some sense of security (false? I don't think so).

-daniel

Thanks for your replies. I did a triage over the benefits of administering the server by hand and decided that I'll go with CPanel/WHM for the moment.