If you have followed my Infinite Plex tutorial, you are now in the possession of a VPS powerful enough for just about any task.
What else can you do with it except host Plex? Well... most people use their VPS to host a website, or even several sites.
With the knowledge you already gained from setting up your VPS, adding a site will be a breeze! And it need not cost anything extra.
Things you need:
If you already have a VPS for Plex, it will be powerful enough for just about any site. If you don't have a VPS yet, check Lowendbox for VPS offers as affordable as $10/year. For a low usage website you won't need to go all out just yet - you can always upgrade later.
You can even get a completely free VPS from Google. It is beyond the scope of this guide to explain exactly how that works, but keep it in mind in case you ever need one.
Before you proceed, it is vital that you finish Part 1 and Part 2 of the Plex tutorial first so that your basics are covered. You can skip the cloud setup if you don't need unlimited storage for Plex. In that case you can skip requesting and enabling FUSE as well. Done? Ok, then let's start!
You can go all out and register any domain with any provider you want, but for the sake of this tutorial, I went with a free version.
The best place to get a free domain is Freenom. Think of a catchy name, then click "Check Availability". I don't think there is any limit to the amount of domains you can register, but I won't be greedy, one is enough for now. Tech makes me say "GAH" a lot, so techperplexed.ga it is!
Once you click "Checkout" you will be presented with the period you want to register the domain for. Up to 12 months is free... so go for it! You will receive a reminder when the domain is due for renewal, then you can add another 12 months for free - if you keep renewing, the domain can be yours forever.
Finish the registration until you see the confirmation.
You are invited to "Click here to go to your Client Area", so let's do that.
Click "Services" in the top menu, then "My Domains".
You will see the domain(s) you have registered here. Next, click "Manage Domain".
Under "Management Tools", click "Nameservers".
Make sure "Use default nameservers" is ticked and click "Change Nameservers".
Lastly, we need to point our domain to our VPS. You already entered the IP address of your VPS in PuTTY, so either check PuTTY, or the client area of your VPS provider.
Copy the IP address of your VPS, then in the Freenom client area click "Manage Freenom DNS".
Here you add your website, as well as any subdomains you wish to utilize (don't worry, I'll explain all that later). You can always change this later, but for now, follow these instructions exactly.
Click "More Records" twice so that you have a total of three rows, like the screenshot below.
Under "Name", leave the first field empty. Type "www" in the second row.
The third field is optional and you can always change this later. You can have any subdomain you want - I picked "demo" for demonstration purposes only.
In all three cases, keep "Type" as "A" and TTL to the default 14440.
Don't forget to paste your own VPS IP address in all three rows under "Target"!
Click "Save Changes" and click away your browser for now.
We can now move on to Part 2 - Installing Linux Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) on your VPS.
What else can you do with it except host Plex? Well... most people use their VPS to host a website, or even several sites.
With the knowledge you already gained from setting up your VPS, adding a site will be a breeze! And it need not cost anything extra.
Things you need:
- A VPS of your choice.
- A domain: we're going with a free domain for this tutorial.
- A website: you will learn how to setup WordPress as your content management system.
VPS
If you already have a VPS for Plex, it will be powerful enough for just about any site. If you don't have a VPS yet, check Lowendbox for VPS offers as affordable as $10/year. For a low usage website you won't need to go all out just yet - you can always upgrade later.
You can even get a completely free VPS from Google. It is beyond the scope of this guide to explain exactly how that works, but keep it in mind in case you ever need one.
Before you proceed, it is vital that you finish Part 1 and Part 2 of the Plex tutorial first so that your basics are covered. You can skip the cloud setup if you don't need unlimited storage for Plex. In that case you can skip requesting and enabling FUSE as well. Done? Ok, then let's start!
Registering a domain
You can go all out and register any domain with any provider you want, but for the sake of this tutorial, I went with a free version.
The best place to get a free domain is Freenom. Think of a catchy name, then click "Check Availability". I don't think there is any limit to the amount of domains you can register, but I won't be greedy, one is enough for now. Tech makes me say "GAH" a lot, so techperplexed.ga it is!
Once you click "Checkout" you will be presented with the period you want to register the domain for. Up to 12 months is free... so go for it! You will receive a reminder when the domain is due for renewal, then you can add another 12 months for free - if you keep renewing, the domain can be yours forever.
Finish the registration until you see the confirmation.
You are invited to "Click here to go to your Client Area", so let's do that.
Pointing the domain to the VPS
Click "Services" in the top menu, then "My Domains".
You will see the domain(s) you have registered here. Next, click "Manage Domain".
Under "Management Tools", click "Nameservers".
Make sure "Use default nameservers" is ticked and click "Change Nameservers".
Lastly, we need to point our domain to our VPS. You already entered the IP address of your VPS in PuTTY, so either check PuTTY, or the client area of your VPS provider.
Here you add your website, as well as any subdomains you wish to utilize (don't worry, I'll explain all that later). You can always change this later, but for now, follow these instructions exactly.
Click "More Records" twice so that you have a total of three rows, like the screenshot below.
Under "Name", leave the first field empty. Type "www" in the second row.
The third field is optional and you can always change this later. You can have any subdomain you want - I picked "demo" for demonstration purposes only.
In all three cases, keep "Type" as "A" and TTL to the default 14440.
Don't forget to paste your own VPS IP address in all three rows under "Target"!
We can now move on to Part 2 - Installing Linux Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) on your VPS.
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