Phase 3 - Deploy A Server

A Guide on VPS Cloud Server Deployment using Debian 11

Lance Pierson

Nov 30, 2022

Phase 4 - Core Server Configuration

Phase 5 - Deploy an Apache website

Phase 6 - Full Stack Server Configuration

Phase 7 - Using WordPress as an Integrated FTP

Phase 8 - Install SMTP Mail Server

Phase 3 - Deploy a Server:

In Phase 2 you created an account with UpCloud.com, let’s go ahead and log in with the credentials you created.

Once logged in you will see your “Workspace” with “Deploy Server” button in the center of the page. Go ahead and click ”Deploy Server”

The first option is to choose the location of the server, these locations are all major data centers located around the globe. All of these locations have state of the art hardware and UpCloud advertises that their systems are the fastest in the world. I did a quick test based on this list of the fastest cloud services in the world as of 2022, the fastest on that list is interserver.net. I pinged my site on UpCloud vs interserver.net and here are the results: treyark.com on Upcloud.com is 15ms, interserver.net is 17ms So according to this test yes UpCloud is faster by 2ms

PS C:\Users\treya> ping -4 treyark.com

Pinging treyark.com [152.44.45.184] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 152.44.45.184: bytes=32 time=18ms TTL=52
Reply from 152.44.45.184: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=52
Reply from 152.44.45.184: bytes=32 time=19ms TTL=52
Reply from 152.44.45.184: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=52

Ping statistics for 152.44.45.184:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 9ms, Maximum = 19ms, Average = 15ms


PS C:\Users\treya> ping -4 interserver.net

Pinging interserver.net [104.22.23.206] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 104.22.23.206: bytes=32 time=17ms TTL=55
Reply from 104.22.23.206: bytes=32 time=13ms TTL=55
Reply from 104.22.23.206: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=55
Reply from 104.22.23.206: bytes=32 time=23ms TTL=55

Ping statistics for 104.22.23.206:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 13ms, Maximum = 23ms, Average = 17ms

For the location I’m choosing San Jose California, which is a major hub of Silicon Valley, and it just happens to be closest to me. This close proximity may have skewed our speed test… Lets check if that’s true. Below it a trace route test, UpCloud has 16 hops and interserver.net has 13 hops, so no our server 3 more hops but is still faster.

PS C:\Users\treya> tracert -4 treyark.com

Tracing route to treyark.com [152.44.45.184]

  1     1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  10.0.0.1
  2    11 ms     9 ms     9 ms  xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx REDACTED
  3     8 ms     8 ms     8 ms  po-301-1209-rur01.windsor.ca.sfba.comcast.net [68.85.190.241]
  4    10 ms    10 ms    10 ms  be-202-rar01.rohnertpr.ca.sfba.comcast.net [68.85.57.33]
  5    12 ms    12 ms    12 ms  be-297-ar01.santaclara.ca.sfba.comcast.net [96.108.99.13]
  6    15 ms    13 ms    14 ms  be-36311-cs01.sunnyvale.ca.ibone.comcast.net [96.110.41.65]
  7    21 ms    36 ms    13 ms  be-3102-pe02.529bryant.ca.ibone.comcast.net [96.110.41.210]
  8    33 ms    18 ms    14 ms  50.248.118.238
  9    40 ms    35 ms    43 ms  be2431.ccr41.sjc03.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.88.189]
 10   132 ms    39 ms    50 ms  be3144.ccr22.sjc01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.5.101]
 12    89 ms    29 ms    47 ms  38.104.135.226
 13     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 14     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 15     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 16    16 ms    15 ms    13 ms  152-44-45-184.us-sjo1.upcloud.host [152.44.45.184]

Trace complete.
PS C:\Users\treya> tracert -4 interserver.net

Tracing route to interserver.net [104.22.23.206]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     3 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  10.0.0.1
  2    10 ms    23 ms    17 ms  xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx REDACTED
  3    10 ms    12 ms    11 ms  po-301-1209-rur01.windsor.ca.sfba.comcast.net [68.85.190.241]
  4    24 ms    30 ms    15 ms  be-202-rar01.rohnertpr.ca.sfba.comcast.net [68.85.57.33]
  5    13 ms    13 ms    13 ms  be-297-ar01.santaclara.ca.sfba.comcast.net [96.108.99.13]
  6    12 ms    14 ms    12 ms  be-36321-cs02.sunnyvale.ca.ibone.comcast.net [96.110.41.69]
  7    65 ms    13 ms    13 ms  be-1212-cr12.sunnyvale.ca.ibone.comcast.net [96.110.46.18]
  8    16 ms    13 ms    13 ms  be-301-cr12.9greatoaks.ca.ibone.comcast.net [96.110.37.170]
  9    13 ms    18 ms    13 ms  be-1212-cs02.9greatoaks.ca.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.166.145]
 10    13 ms    15 ms    14 ms  be-2211-pe11.9greatoaks.ca.ibone.comcast.net [96.110.32.246]
 11    19 ms    19 ms    13 ms  50.242.151.238
 12    20 ms    13 ms    16 ms  172.68.188.20
 13    15 ms    15 ms    16 ms  104.22.23.206

Trace complete.

For the Service Plan, we are going to select the $5/month plan that gives us 1 Processing Core, 1GB of Random Access Memory, 25GB of SSD Storage at a 1TB Transfer speed.

For the Operating System we will select Debian 11. Fun facts; 90% of all cloud infrastructure operates on Linux & Debian is one of the oldest and most stable operating systems based on the Linux kernel. Debian is the Base for many other Distributions like Ubuntu. Google's servers use a heavily customized version of Debian. This is what influenced my decision to select Debian as the core foundation for my web applications. -see sources

Next up is the “Login Method”. We will be setting up SSH keys on the server in just a bit, but here we will select a “One Time Password”.

Select your method to receive the One Time Password.

There is no initialization script in this tutorial, so we can skip that. I will release an initialization script based on this tutorial in March 2023. You can find it at this address Springboard Initialization Script V1.0

For “Hostname” and “Server Name”, you can leave them as they are or change them, this can always be changed later. Here I will name mine both “cloudninja”

Finish up and click “Deploy”

Your “One Time Password” will be presented in a pop up, go ahead and save this to WordPad or something, we will use this along with the server IP address in just a bit. This will also be sent by the delivery method you checked on #8 above.

The server takes around 5 minutes to deploy, go ahead and copy the IP address of the server & add that to the same document you saved your “One Time Password” to.