Do-It-Yourself LAMP Hosting and LAMP Alternatives

[Jonathan Lahijani]

As of about 5 years ago, I strongly prefer to use DigitalOcean to host my ProcessWire websites.  By that, I mean I usually start with a clean Ubuntu droplet (not their pre-configured LAMP droplet) and then build the LAMP stack manually by running installing and configuring the necessary software.  I can get a server going in about 5-10 minutes doing it "by hand" (i.e., not running an automated setup script).  With this approach, I get a server that runs what I want without any bloat (bloat being Cpanel and all the beginner / GUI type-stuff you get with a typical host provider).

I am comfortable with command line (not an expert by any means) but know how to figure out issues as they arise, such as installing any necessary or missing Apache modules and edge-case things like that.

I don't consider myself a hosting expert either by any means, so in the back of my mind I often wonder if I have any glaring holes in my setup.  For example, is using the default port of 22 really that bad if there's already login throttling?  So far, I've never had an issue and I believe the defaults these days cover you pretty well.  Ubuntu by default automatically installs updates and reminds you to reboot the server when necessary.  Is Ubuntu LTS a "bad" distro to use for web servers for any reason compared to others?

With that being said, I wanted to get some thoughts here from those who host themselves and any thoughts on DIY servers.

Also, Apache, MySQL and PHP all have alternatives:

• Apache --> Nginx/Caddy
• MySQL --> MariaDB
• PHP --> HHVM (is this still a thing?)

My belief when it comes to these alternatives is that while they might be "superior" and might provide some benefit, it seems the default software (Apache/MySQL/PHP) eventually catch up to the point where the alternative doesn't really make much of a difference, or at least in my use cases it won't.  I prefer to stick with the defaults because it just works and ProcessWire is specifically tested with this stack.

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I guess this is a way of me saying that web tech changes quite rapidly, but playing this catch-up game of using the new, hot thing or getting anxiety because I feel like I'm not keeping up with it --VERSUS-- the reality (in my case) of it totally not making a difference when it comes to the bottom line has made me feel that the default / out-of-the-box way is totally fine.

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Note: I might consider using this in the future for automated LAMP setup: https://github.com/teddysun/lamp

[rick]

I like that automated script setup. I just finished a new manual vps LAMP setup and documented my particular procedure so that I could create my own automation script. When I say, my process, it's nothing fancy. Doing tasks by memory is error prone, and I've overlooked a few necessary modules in recent months. There is a reason an aircraft has checklists. The same should apply to a server configuration. Now I'll be looking at this script to see what I need to add for my process.

I started with FreeBSD in the 90s simply because it is original and not bloated. Then I went with Debian for quite a few years, and for a number of years now run Ubuntu Server (recently 20.04 LTS). All three are great even today. The server version of Ubuntu is easily maintained since updates only apply to the programs you installed, such as imagemagick, curl, http2, etc. There isn't any default gui stuff to get in the way. So this default out-of-the-box setup is quite sufficient now and in the foreseeable future.

 

[rick]

@Jonathan Lahijani,

One more thing I want to add to the "basic" setup is the use of rsync. I'm sure you're aware of it's uses, I just thought I'd mention it since it's not part of the LAMP package install.