Signing Up & Selecting a Data Center for your Virtual Server

[MUSIC] 0:00 If you wanna set up a web server, you have a few different options. 0:05 You could go with shared hosting. 0:08 Now that's very cheap, but it does not provide a lot of flexibility. 0:11 On the other end of the spectrum, you could 0:14 rent or buy your own server and have it hosted. 0:16 That, however does cost quite a bit of money and will cause 0:19 a lot of pain and frustration as you try to manage it. 0:22 In between you have the VPS, or virtual private server. 0:25 It offers all the benefits of having 0:29 your own server that you can install anything you want on, 0:30 however the hardware itself has virtualized making it a great value. 0:34 We'll be setting up a virtual private server with Linode. 0:38 One of my favorite VPS providers. 0:41 To get started we go to linode.com and click on Sign Up. 0:43 Then all we have to do is give our username and password. 0:48 And type in our billing information. 0:51 After we do that, we need to select our plan. 0:53 Linode provides several different plans at different price points and power levels. 0:55 We're gonna be choosing the Linode 1024 because it's 1:00 about the size that I want for my server. 1:02 You can resize your Linode later on if you want, there will be a little bit 1:05 of downtime though, so I'm going to choose 1:08 Linode 1024, and then we choose our payment term. 1:10 We can go month to month, but if we pay a 1:14 year or for two years, we can get a nice little discount. 1:15 Then all we need to do 1:20 is click on Continue to sign up. 1:21 Your account should be activated right away, or 1:23 it might just take a couple of minutes. 1:25 Now that your account has been activated, we're gonna 1:28 go back to Linode.com and click on Log in. 1:30 We'll type in our username and password. 1:34 Once we sign in, we'll have to choose a data center for our server to live in. 1:39 There are many of them available throughout the world, 1:43 and which one you choose is up to you. 1:45 You may choose the one that is nearest to you or 1:47 nearest to where your customers who might be accessing your servers live. 1:49 I'm gonna choose Atlanta because I'm on the east coast 1:53 of the United States and that's the nearest one to me. 1:56 I'll just click place the Linode here. 1:59 Now it's going to take us to the Rebuild tab for our Linode. 2:02 This is where we'll set up and provision our 2:05 server with the operating system options that we want. 2:07 The first thing that we need to choose is our distribution. 2:10 I'm going to suggest that we use Ubuntu 2:13 12.04 LTS and I'm gonna choose it in 64-bit. 2:15 If you don't know which Linux distribution you want, Ubuntu is a good choice. 2:21 12.04 was released in early 2012, and the LTS means it's 2:25 a long-term provided Linux version, which means that this particular 2:30 version of Ubuntu will be supported for a couple of years. 2:34 Then we choose our deployment disk size. 2:38 By default, it's going to use the entire 2:40 disk of our Linode for this operating system. 2:42 That's probably a good default. 2:44 As well as a swap disk, we also recommend use the default provided to you. 2:46 The last thing we need is to choose our 2:50 root password, which we'll use to log into our system. 2:52 Let me just set it up. 2:55 Once you've got all the options just click Rebuild, and it will build your server. 2:58 Then all we need to do is wait for Linode to build our server for us. 3:02 This will take a few minutes, but you can 3:06 track its status on the dashboard page for your Linode, 3:07 once the provisioning is completed, all we need to 3:10 do is click on Boot to start up our Linode. 3:12 Click OK, and it'll start up your server. 3:15 The next thing we need to do is log in to our Linode. 3:19