Jeff Wilson

An experienced Linux veteran with many years of experience. Helping other Linux admins with frequent Linux and business-related blog posts on the RoseHosting blog. Techie by choice. Loving nature and travel. Happily married and father of two lovely children.

How to Speed up Your Nginx Website

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How to Speed up Your Nginx Website

In this tutorial, we will explain how to tune and optimize your Nginx configuration file to help speed up your website’s performance.

Nginx is a fast, lightweight, and high-performance web server in charge of serving at least 40% of all websites globally. When compared to other web servers, Nginx is primarily known for its speed, with it capable of handling thousands of concurrent connections with ease. Nginx can also be used as a load balancer, a reverse proxy, and an HTTP caching server. It uses little resources and is ideal for delivering static content.

To help further improve performance, Nginx has a built-in caching system that allows dynamic requests to be cached directly on the server for future requests, thereby reducing the load on your CPU and system in general.

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How to Create and Run Cron Jobs on Linux

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Cron is a scheduling utility in Linux distributions that can be used to executes tasks at specified intervals. It allows you to run almost any commands or scripts at a specific time and date, or at a recurring interval.

Cron is a very useful tool for a system administrators to automate repetitive tasks of any sort, such as system updates, sending emails, checking system resource usage, creating backups, and so on. Realistically, anything that can be automated can be added to Cron so that it executes without any user involvement.

Cron runs in the background and constantly checks the /etc/crontab file, and the /etc/cron.*/ and /var/spool/cron/ directories. Each user has their own separate crontab file.

In this tutorial, we will show you how to create and run Cron jobs on a Linux VPS. The same steps should work on almost all Linux machines, regardless of whether it’s a server or a desktop computer.

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Bash Script Examples

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In this tutorial, we will explain the most common bash operations while also showing you a few bash script examples.

A Unix shell program interprets instructions and programs in the form of commands. These commands are either directly entered by the user, or they can be run in sequence from a file (called a shell script). An important distinction of bash scripts when compared to other coding languages is that they are interpreted and not compiled. When you write a shell script and then run it, it’s interpreted by your operating system, with no compilation required.

Bash scripts are a versatile and handy tool that most system administrators love using to simplify their workflow and automate repetitive tasks. With scripts, you can do almost anything that you can do using a normal shell environment.

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How to Install and Configure CyberPanel on CentOS 8

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In this tutorial, we will explain how to install and configure CyberPanel on a CentOS 8 VPS.

The web hosting industry is expanding and evolving every day. Web hosting control panels are one of the core elements of this growing industry, thanks to people that are new to web hosting needing a user-friendly way to manage their server.

There’s plenty of choice when looking at installing a control panel on your VPS. A few well-known commercial control panels are Plesk, DirectAdmin, and cPanel. To use these control panels, you need to pay for licenses, which can quickly become costly if the number of users you need isn’t very large. However, there are some open-source control panels that can help fulfill this role. Among them, CyberPanel is a free, open-source, and next-generation web hosting control panel powered by OpenLiteSpeed.

With CyberPanel, you can add new domains/virtual hosts and manage SSL certificates for them. It also provides a one-click installer for WordPress, Prestashop and Joomla.

CyperPanel offers a rich set of features, including a Web Based Terminal, a Git Manager, Auto SSL, PowerDNS, FTP, a Firewall, a File Manager, a PHP Manager, Backup and Restore, and lots more. Let’s get started.

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How to Add a User to a Group on a Linux Server

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How to Add a User to a Group on Linux

User groups play an important role in any Linux operating system and its distributions. Groups make it easier to manage larger amounts of users, giving you the ability to give all of them the same security and access privileges.

For example, files and devices may be granted access based on a user’s ID or group ID. Groups allow you to set a file’s permission for the entire group instead of setting permissions for each individual user. Overall, this makes managing permissions for your server’s users a very simple and straightforward process. Let’s show you how to add users to groups on a Linux VPS.

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How to Install phpMyAdmin on CentOS 8

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This tutorial explains the process of installing one of the most popular open-source applications for managing MySQL databases – phpMyAdmin. phpMyAdmin is a free and open-source web-based application written in PHP, used to easily manage MySQL databases through your favorite web browser instead of needing to use the MySQL command line interface.

PhpMyAdmin allows users to create, modify, rename, and delete databases, tables, or fields, execute SQL commands through the browser, import and export tables to a wide range of formats, create users and modify their privileges, and much more… Thanks to this tool, we will almost never need to use the MySQL command line again. We are going to install phpMyAdmin on a CentOS 8 VPS with Apache, MariaDB, and of course, PHP. Let’s begin.

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How to Install and Integrate BigBlueButton with WordPress

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In this tutorial, we will show you how to set up a BigBlueButton server on Ubuntu 16.04 and integrate it with WordPress using the BigBlueButton plugin.

BigBlueButton is a free and open-source web conferencing system that can be used for online learning, online meetings, and webinars. It’s based on HTML5 and runs entirely within your web browser. BigBlueButton provides high-quality audio, video, and screen sharing using the browser’s built-in support for web real-time communication (WebRTC) libraries. It can be also integrated into WordPress, allowing bloggers to create and manage meeting rooms to interact with their readers.

These excellent features make BigBlueButton one of the best tools for tutors, teachers, schools, colleges, universities, and even entire school districts. At the time of writing this tutorial, the latest version of BigBlueButton is 2.2 and it can be installed on Ubuntu 16.04.  The BigBlueButton authors plan to support Ubuntu 18.04 and Ubuntu 20.04 for the next release of BigBlueButton, but their current recommended version is 16.04. Let’s get started with the installation. Let’s get started with installing BigBlueButton on an Ubuntu 16.04 VPS.

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How to Change the Default SSH Port on Linux

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In this tutorial, we will show you how to change the SSH default port in Linux, and go over why changing this default port is a good idea. IMPORTANT: Before we go any further, you should understand that this is not a solution that will prevent or deter a determined hacker to attack your SSH service. It is merely a measure to help you avoid the thousands of automated bots running all the time scanning vast ranges of IP space searching for standard SSH ports being open. Preventing a determined hacker from brute-forcing your SSH service is beyond the scope of this article.

SSH, also known as Secure Shell, is the most widely-used protocol for connecting to and managing Linux systems remotely. SSH offers strong encryption and authentication along with excellent customizability, and using SSH gives you the freedom of accessing a remote machine. You can run services and software as if you were physically using the machine, no matter where you are.

By default, SSH runs on port 22. Since this is common knowledge, this port often becomes a target for brute force attacks. Because this provides full access to your server’s OS, people with malicious intent will often target port 22 more than any other port. Changing the default SSH port will prevent automated attacks that don’t spend the time to rotate ports when targeting a Linux Server. To protect your server from a brute force attack, you should change the default SSH port to something else.

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