Use Webmin? Host domains? Check out Virtualmin
When I originally decided to host from home a few years back I had to do more than just decide to fire up a webserver and NAT from my router to it. Choosing an operating system and web server software and application server was another consideration. Did I want to run Linux? Solaris? Microsoft IIS? and did I want to go with PHP or ASP? What was I going to use as a CMS for my primary site and what blog software would suit my requirements?
Ultimately I decided on OpenBSD with Apache and PHP and Windows + IIS. Of course I knew that over time I would be constantly changing this and I needed a way to effictively manage the domains themselves and the sites and database dumps. Obviously I needed a control panel of some sorts and after a bit of investigation I settled on Virtualmin.
Virtualmin is created by the same people who created the excellent and utterly essential Webmin control panel and as such the Virtualmin module integrates nicely into Webmin. Oh, and it’s free!
Originally this site was hosted on Windows Server and IIS and powered by BlogEngine.NET but I found it a bit of a pain to handle two different types of blogging software so I migrated this blog over to WordPress and host it with my other sites. Over time my other server changed several times from OpenBSD to Ubuntu, then Solaris 10 running on a Sun Workstation, back to Ubuntu and currently onto the Debian machine where they currently reside. With Virtualmin moving platforms was a simple matter of restoring from the backups that I took from the machine that was to be replaced.
Of course with it now being relatively trivial to change servers I find myself experimenting a bit more and I’m currently fighting the urge to move everything over to a FreeBSD server but for the moment I’m successfully resisting that urge!
