This course offers an in-depth, hands-on overview of setting up and configuring a production web server, using Linode or Digital Ocean. Virtual Cloud Servers have become the industry standard for hosting web applications of all sizes and complexity. This includes small static web pages, to dynamic, database driven web sites that handle thousands of simultaneous processes. Regardless of the project, virtual servers offer a solution that provides web developers a scalable infrastructure that can easily adapt to a changing environment.

The course starts with an overview of the registration process on Linode. From there, students quickly jump into deploying and configuring a server using the latest Ubuntu LTS distribution. Students will become familiar with the Linode admin interface, and start executing basic commands using the web based remote access console. We then explore remote access administration using more complex tools such as PuTTY for Windows, and Terminal for MAC.

Students will install and configure LAMP Stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PhpMyAdmin) on the Ubuntu server. We show students how to secure the server through SSH Authentication, directory permissions, and disable root user access.

The course explores remote visual desktop configuration using TightVNC & RealVNC.

Once students have a firm handle on server configuration on Linode, we take a look at another major cloud provider – Digital Ocean. This section of the course provides an overview of the Digital Ocean Admin panel where students will deploy and configure a “Droplet”. We will explore some of the unique features Digital Ocean offers, such as Floating IP’s and Space storage.

Students learn to backup, resize, and configure DNS Zone files on both cloud hosting providers.