My Website Journey

After a couple years of managing both Windows and Linux servers, I will review some of the differences between the two different servers.  Both of them are very different and not one will fit for everyone.  I will explain the differences and it will be up to you to make the decision on the server to choose.

I have been running a Windows server for many years both at my own house and a Windows VPS with GoDaddy.  A Windows server is MUCH easier to manage, setup and get running.  Everything is fairly simple to do but simplicity does come with its downfalls.  Since everything can be done within a GUI (Graphical User Interface), it does limit the amount of things that can be done. Read more…

So today I am going to go a little off topic and look into OpenVPN Access Server.  It is really cool application that is free for two concurrent users and works great! I set it up on my own home server so that I am able to connect from it remotely.  You can also set this up on you web server allowing you to remotely connect in and it would be just as if your web server and your own computer were on the same machine.

So what is VPN for the people that don’t know what it is? VPN stands for Virtual Private Network and it is a way to simulate computers connected directly together even if they are miles away.  It is able to do this by connecting the machines through a secured encrypted channel.  This way you can do things like access files remotely and securely.  This also allows you to perform actions just as if you were physically connected to the network like reconfiguring your wireless router, print, etc… Read more…

Now that I was able to get Apache, PHP and MySql running on my CentOS 5 64-bit VPS, I have to actually build a website.  I decided to go with WordPress because it is one of the best Blogging/CMS systems out there.  After all this site is powered off of WordPress as well.  So I purchased a domain, http://www.popcornblogs.com/ set up the DNS servers to point to my VPS from Burst.NET.  Now that everything is setup, I just need to go to the WordPress website to download the latest version.

WordPress can be obtained by visiting http://wordpress.org/.  Download the latest version and extract the contents into your webserver’s directory.  After you have extract the contents to your webserver’s folder.  Navigate to the home directory and a page should come up stating that a configure file is required.  Click to configure your WordPress blog and input your database information (Database, server, login, password).  If you click next and you come up with the same prompt again, that means that your file permissions aren’t set correctly. Read more…