At the start of this year, I was curious to see if I could manage a VPS and started with Vultr HF because I had a Cloudways Vultr HF Hosting. About one month ago, I was looking to save some costs without losing server speed. So I made some comparisons and found that Hostinger VPS offering is as good as Vultr HF, but at half the price.
Because there is a mixed feeling about how much effort managing your VPS costs, I want to share my experience so far. Spoiler alert, it’s ok, and Hostringer is way cheaper than other VPS hosting companies.
Setting up your VPS
The first thing that can put you off when hosting your website on a VPS you’ll have to manage yourself is setting up the item. Most VPS providers like Vultr or Hostinger offer at least some form of a simple OS installation. This makes at least the basic installation easy.
First, you must know what you want to run for OS and Panel. I knew I wanted to go with Cyberpanel to give OpenLitespeed a spin. Usually, you get a Linux OS distribution for free on a VPS. To pick the right one, I read the documents of Cyberpanel. They recommended Ubuntu 22.x, CentOS 8.x or AlmaLinux 8. If you choose to install Plain OS only, you must download and install Cyberpanel yourself (which means one extra command in the CLI).
I felt lazy, so I set up my VPS using the Hostinger one-click install option, which I regretted later. Hostinger is offering CentOS 7 with Cyberpanel by default, but CentOS isn’t supported for much longer, 2024‑06‑30. So I need to reinstall everything in the future…
CentOS 7 will be supported until 2024‑06‑30. Please pick a plain OS, Cent OS 8.x, or Ubuntu 22.x, and install Cyberpanel manually.
Connecting to your VPS
When you install your OS you need to connect to your VPS. This can feel a bit overwhelming using the hacker-like window (also known as the Command line or CLI), but as a designer with some programming knowledge, I know you will manage this too!
Hostinger is trying to offer you a Browser terminal with VNC, but it doesn’t work for me. So I opted to go with something locally, using PuTTy, which helps you get a secure SSH connection to your VPS.
Put in your VPS IP address, add a name to the Saved Sessions part, and hit Save. Then press Open, and voila, you’re connected. Put in your root password, and you’re good to go. However, I forgot to save my password… so I needed to reset it. Lucky for me, Hostinger allows you to change the SSH password afterwords via the Hostinger panel.
Setting up Cyberpanel
Because I took the regretfully easy route, I needed to set up Cyberpanel with a few commands. These commands can be found in the community of Cyberpanel. The Youtube channel IdeaSpot has a fantastic tutorial I followed. This helped a lot, so I put it here, hoping it’ll help you.
Install Cyberpanel command:
sh <(curl https://cyberpanel.net/install.sh || wget -O - https://cyberpanel.net/install.sh)After installation, go to your IP address on port 8090, for example, 127.0.0.1:8090. Here you’ll see Cyberpanel, and you can follow the rest of its steps to log in and start creating your website.
Creating a website in Cyberpanel
In my opinion, it’s very self-explanatory how to create a website. Suppose you have ever used a control panel like Siteground, Cpanel, Direct Admin, or any. It feels about the same as which steps to take.
Since I needed to migrate my website from Vultr to Hostinger there were some important settings in Cyberpanel to be set before it all worked. For my compressed website files, I needed to increase the file upload size in Cyberpanel. This is all covered in the video from IdeaSpot you can find above.
After it was all installed I pointed my domain parked at Cloudflare to the VPS server. And voila, everything was there!
Setting up experience
At the beginning of the month, these were all the steps I needed to take to get my website up and running on a VPS in Cyberpanel with OpenLitespeed. In my experience, it was fine to do so. It was fun to try something new and see if it all goes well. I know this isn’t for everyone.
If you want a VPS without all the setup hassle, please look at Cloudways and why I highly recommend it. Although they are twice as expensive than normal VPS pricing from Digital Ocean, Vultr etc.. They just offer a lot. Amazing support, ease of use and always up-to-date. So if you’re looking for the next step in your website hosting definitly check out Cloudways.
