Well, the machine seems to be all set up and everything's working. Looking good. I'm 95% sure that this is going to work out just fine for hosting my design clients. I've never been on a server where I had to know so much. The books I ordered should be here today. Will someone say something encouraging and get me up to 99.9% sure? (Nothing's 100%. )

Any experiences from when you were new at this might help the confidence level.

Good luck man! But really, I never had a dedicated server before either and the last couple weeks have been quite a learning experience for me, I actually got my server setup pretty good and already have a few clients that seem to be happy with everything so I just go back everynight and browse different forums, sites, and ask alot of questions about the things I don't know about, It will be ok if you dedicated yourself to it and learning all you can about it. and of course you always have the nice people here at servermatrix to help out if you fall down Just take it slow and learn as you go, If I can get the hang of it I'm sure you can!

Thanks for the reply. I think that one got me up to 98%!

I've ordered some books and will learn all I can so I won't be a bother to the techs all of the time. I think it'll be ok. I have a few old machines out back in the storage building. I'm going to try to get one going with Red Hat and try to hook it up to my home network to play with. It won't matter if I mess that one up. I'll just start over.

I'd still rather be playing golf.

You'll be fine, Just remember you will get out of it as much as you put into it

Bless you for buying the books with intent to learn.

Support your local tech support! RTFM!

I'm sure if you have any questions the staff or forum goers here will give you good info.

Did most of you get a control panel installed? Is anyone running without one?


I'm pretty much a 'Google It' person myself, but the effect for you should be about the same!

Congratulations I am sure the experience you had setting the server up would be a valuable lesson, one which would propel you to greater things ahead. I am sure you will do well.

Know that we will be here to support you if you need help

I personally am a Control Panel person and have them installed for both my servers here.

I am sure you can run without one, it basically depends on what you are using the server for. If it is for something like game servers or some database servers, basically those dedicated application then you be better off without a control panel.

On the other end, if you are doing web hosting services, you definitely need the control panel for your clients.

Anything in-between would depend on your skill level.

For me, I tend to leave out one or ten things when setting up accounts and thus the control panel keeps me in the right path.

I went without one for this 'experiment' (it's an experiment until i have everything up and running...). Never had one on my Verio server.

I do currently have my site on another server supplier. I made a deal with a fellow who said he was a server admin person. I wanted to pay someone to set up a dedicated for me. He recommended the host I have Elsmar.com on now (cheap, good connection, etc., but very unresponsive support) but he turned out to be mostly a programmer trying to make some money keeping sites up (reselling) and he has cPanel/WHM on that server. Everything was trial and error. It took him 2 days to figure out Frontpage extensions were installed and for whatever reason none of my perl scripts would run. It took almost a week to get the server set up and online... He has it pretty screwed up, but for now everything is running. I decided to learn - to do it all myself from scratch - and have planned 4 weeks to do it. I came here through recommendations at WHT forums and the vBulletin forums. My site is basically a 'forum style help site' for quality assurance people.

For me cPanel was (is?) overkill as all I keep is my site - I don't resell.

So - for a bit I'm sure I'll be asking some real dumb questions, but believe me when I say I appreciate help!

I know what you mean. Cpanel is definitely an overkill for my requirements because all I do on the server is to host 4 of my sites. But being a Linux newbie, it is more pain to start the server with a plain linux install. I needed the server to be up as soon as possible, have it handle all the setups for me and generally ensure that everything is nicely set up and patched up so i do not need to bother too much about all the little things in life.

The $20 per month buys me a peace of mind and there is nothing that I would do to give that up. I did not have the luxury of spending 6 months doing all the ground works in getting the server up and running, I can only afford a week and cpanel helps me with that.

I am a programmer by trade and I do not want to waste time doing all the tweaking of the servers when it can be done through an automated process. I would want to channel those time to do what I am supposed to do and that's to develop applications.

Of course, if it is to get the server to learn the underlining operating system then yes, the plain install is great.

I have to admit part of what I'm doing is because I want to learn everything on this level from the getgo.

I can see advantages to a control panel, but to me it was just overhead.

I'm on FreeBSD here but my site is currently on Redhat 9.