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Signing Up & Selecting a Data Center for your Virtual Server

3:21 with Jim Hoskins

When you want to setup your web server, you have a few different options. The first is shared hosting, which is very cheap but does not provide a lot of flexibility. On the other end of the spectrum, you could rent or buy your own server and have it hosted. The problem is that this will cost quite a lot of money, and give you a lot of pain and frustration as you try to manage it. In between is a VPS - Virtual Private Server. It offers all of the benefits of owning your own server, but the hardware is virtualized which makes it a great value. In this video, we'll show you how to setup a VPS with Linode.

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    [MUSIC]

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    If you wanna set up a web server, you have a few different options.

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    You could go with shared hosting.

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    Now that's very cheap, but it does not provide a lot of flexibility.

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    On the other end of the spectrum, you could

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    rent or buy your own server and have it hosted.

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    That, however does cost quite a bit of money and will cause

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    a lot of pain and frustration as you try to manage it.

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    In between you have the VPS, or virtual private server.

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    It offers all the benefits of having

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    your own server that you can install anything you want on,

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    however the hardware itself has virtualized making it a great value.

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    We'll be setting up a virtual private server with Linode.

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    One of my favorite VPS providers.

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    To get started we go to linode.com and click on Sign Up.

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    Then all we have to do is give our username and password.

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    And type in our billing information.

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    After we do that, we need to select our plan.

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    Linode provides several different plans at different price points and power levels.

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    We're gonna be choosing the Linode 1024 because it's

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    about the size that I want for my server.

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    You can resize your Linode later on if you want, there will be a little bit

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    of downtime though, so I'm going to choose

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    Linode 1024, and then we choose our payment term.

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    We can go month to month, but if we pay a

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    year or for two years, we can get a nice little discount.

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    Then all we need to do

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    is click on Continue to sign up.

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    Your account should be activated right away, or

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    it might just take a couple of minutes.

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    Now that your account has been activated, we're gonna

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    go back to Linode.com and click on Log in.

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    We'll type in our username and password.

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    Once we sign in, we'll have to choose a data center for our server to live in.

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    There are many of them available throughout the world,

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    and which one you choose is up to you.

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    You may choose the one that is nearest to you or

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    nearest to where your customers who might be accessing your servers live.

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    I'm gonna choose Atlanta because I'm on the east coast

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    of the United States and that's the nearest one to me.

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    I'll just click place the Linode here.

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    Now it's going to take us to the Rebuild tab for our Linode.

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    This is where we'll set up and provision our

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    server with the operating system options that we want.

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    The first thing that we need to choose is our distribution.

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    I'm going to suggest that we use Ubuntu

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    12.04 LTS and I'm gonna choose it in 64-bit.

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    If you don't know which Linux distribution you want, Ubuntu is a good choice.

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    12.04 was released in early 2012, and the LTS means it's

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    a long-term provided Linux version, which means that this particular

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    version of Ubuntu will be supported for a couple of years.

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    Then we choose our deployment disk size.

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    By default, it's going to use the entire

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    disk of our Linode for this operating system.

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    That's probably a good default.

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    As well as a swap disk, we also recommend use the default provided to you.

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    The last thing we need is to choose our

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    root password, which we'll use to log into our system.

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    Let me just set it up.

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    Once you've got all the options just click Rebuild, and it will build your server.

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    Then all we need to do is wait for Linode to build our server for us.

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    This will take a few minutes, but you can

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    track its status on the dashboard page for your Linode,

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    once the provisioning is completed, all we need to

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    do is click on Boot to start up our Linode.

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    Click OK, and it'll start up your server.

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    The next thing we need to do is log in to our Linode.

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