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Server management is the monitoring and control of server computers to which websites or all other applications connected to the internet or running locally are connected, in order to ensure they run properly and stably.

To better understand server management, it is necessary to address the answer to the question of what a server is and the differences between a server and hosting.

What is a Server?

They are hardware and software computer systems that share the data and information stored on them with users on the internet or computer network they are connected to, or with different computer network systems. Servers are high-capacity computers with much more advanced hardware features compared to personal computers used daily.

What is Hosting?

The hosting service, whose Turkish equivalent is “barındırma” (hosting), is provided through the server computers we defined above. The hosting service, where you can store your personal or corporate data and make this data accessible on the internet, is provided through servers configured for this purpose.

Server Management and Managed Servers

Server management is technically a comprehensive operation. To perform server management, it is necessary to be able to connect to the server with full authority, and you need to have high technical knowledge both in terms of hardware and software. We can refer to all intervention operations carried out to stabilize the server and ensure that the systems on it work without problems in any kind of issue that may arise on the server as server management.

We can generally summarize the stages of server management under the following headings.

• Monitoring the server,


• Performing necessary checks and work for the server to operate healthily,


• Regularly performing update and security settings for the operating system and software on the server,


• Intervening in problems that may occur on the server,


• In case of hardware problems, identifying and resolving the issue.

In dedicated server services provided by data centers, since full authority over the server is given to the customer, server management responsibility also belongs to the customer. All operations such as ensuring server security, installing required software, and making necessary interventions to the server in case of problems are under the responsibility of the server owner institution or person.

Physical server owners who do not want to perform server management related operations can request server management services from the company they rent the service from. However, data centers generally provide server management on a paid basis since custom solutions are produced for individuals or institutions for server management operations. You can receive server management support for a certain fee, or you can use the managed server service where all management belongs to the data center.

In the managed server service provided by our company, server management responsibility lies entirely with our support desk. This way, you save the time you would spend on server management. In our managed server service, no extra server management fee is charged. You can use our service with free server management and free cPanel license, and you can spend more time on your projects by leaving server management to our expert support team.

Introduction

Softaculous is a cPanel plugin that allows you to easily install many ready-made scripts (software). It contains 200+ PHP scripts for free. In this article, we will provide information about how to set up a website infrastructure in a few steps using Softaculous on cPanel.

How to Install a Website with Softaculous?

First, we log in to cPanel, then click on the menu called Softaculous.

After loading, the Home Page shown in the image above greets you.

Download the WordPress package from the welcome screen that opens.

Then upload the files inside the zip to public_html using a program like Filezilla or via the File Manager on cPanel.

After this operation, we will encounter a message like the one below. Let us click the “Create Configuration File” button.

If we encounter a screen like the one below, we have done our operations correctly.

Now we can create a database through cPanel.

When a page like the one below appears, enter the Database name, Database Username and Database password; leave other values as they are.

Click the button that says we can now start the installation.

Here, enter your site login password, username, site title and click the “Install WordPress” button.

After this point, your WordPress site is installed.

For login;

www.yoursiteaddress.com/wp-admin

or

www.yoursiteaddress.com/wp-login.php

you can log in. After logging into the panel, you can find new WordPress themes and change them. You can make post entries from the Posts section and add Categories. You can create pages such as contact and about us from the Pages section. You can install and purchase themes and make changes on them. You can improve your site by installing social media plugins, SEO plugins, etc. from the Plugins section. Most of the remaining additional features depend on your coding knowledge. WordPress also has a nice panel for editing codes; you can go directly to the Editor section in the Appearance tab to view and modify the contents of the files inside your theme.

After registering a domain name, simply associating the domain name with a hosting account is not sufficient to publish your website. Your website also needs a healthy DNS configuration to work properly. In this article, we will provide information about correctly editing the Edit DNS Zone content on the server.

Name Server IP Addresses
We recommend entering Name Server records differently. For example,

ns1.ni.net.tr IP: 95.173.189.2

ns2.ni.net.tr IP: 95.173.190.2

let’s say.

You will need to enter these records in Edit DNS Zone as shown in the image at the link below.

siteaddress.com.       86400    IN        NS        ns1.ni.net.tr  or ns1.domainname.com

siteaddress.com.       86400    IN        NS        ns2.ni.net.tr  or ns2.domainname.com

A Record (Glue Records)

Define the DNS records you have created or obtained from your service provider and started using as A records. For example, define the ns1.siteaddress.com and ns2.siteaddress.com DNS records by adding them as A records with ns1 and ns2 from the siteaddress.com DNS zone. Specify the IP addresses as the IP address where the DNS is running.

ns1                       14400    IN         A        95.173.189.2

ns2                       14400    IN         A        95.173.190.2

MX Record

MX records will be automatically created during installation when you purchase a hosting account that includes email service. However, if you want to use this service from email service providers such as Yandex or Gmail, you will need to edit these MX settings.

siteaddress.com.       14400    IN        MX         0        siteaddress.com.

SPF Record

Basically

siteaddress.com.       14400    IN        TXT     “v=spf1 +a +mx +ip4:IP_ADDRESS ~all”

A record like “v=spf1 +a +mx +ip4:IP_ADDRESS ~all” will be created.

After adding this record as well, everything you need to do for healthy email exchange is complete. You can now use email addresses belonging to your domain name.

After making all these settings, you can check whether there is a DNS problem from the address below.

www.intodns.com/siteaddress.com

Plesk control panel is software that allows you to manage your server operating system more easily. With the control panel, you can easily publish many of your websites, open email accounts for your websites, or perform DNS operations much more easily. This panel is installed on Linux or Windows server operating systems. Plesk control panel is a well-known control panel in this scope. It is known as the most used panel after cPanel. Pre-installation preparation;
Plesk control panel is designed to be installed on Windows server and Linux server operating systems with zero configuration, so there is no need to make any adjustments on the server for installation.
Plesk Panel installs all the components you want on the server and configures them in the best way for shared web hosting services. For installation, we go to the download section of the Parallels company website and download the small-sized file that will start the installation. (http://page.plesk.com/plesk-free-download-wp)

After downloading the necessary installation file, we start the installation process by running the “plesk-installer.exe” program. In the first step, a screen asking for your server administrator password will appear; we proceed by entering the administrator password of your server in this field.

In the next step, the screen where we will install the Plesk panel appears. We start the installation process by clicking the “Install or Upgrade Product” link. When we click this link, steps for the Plesk panel version and installation type you will install will appear. We select these fields as indicated in the image and continue the installation process via the “Continue” button.

In this section, the versions of the Plesk panel are listed. Trial versions of the Plesk panel are also available in this area; if there is no special request, the stable version is generally selected. I will select the new panel, the Onyx version, for this guide.

We must make a selection according to the features we want the panel to be installed with. I will select Full installation and add/remove some features. I continue by clicking Continue.

From the panel features screen, I can add or remove the features I want. This way, we prevent unnecessary services from running. However, since Plesk installation is generally requested as standard by netinternet customers, you can easily complete the installation by selecting typical.

We start the installation by entering our Plesk panel password. Our Windows operating system and Plesk panel passwords must be different and strong; otherwise, our server may be hacked.

The installation takes approximately 15-20 minutes.

The installation is complete. You can log in to your panel via ipaddress:8443 or ipaddress:8880 ports.

Example;
192.168.120.20:8443
192.168.120.20:8880

Since we have done a new installation, we need to make some settings in our panel. We continue by selecting our panel theme as “commercial web hosting” “Service Provider view”.

We determine the shared IP address for the websites we will manage in our panel, a new strong password for our panel, and the hostname record of our server, then continue.

We fill in the “Information” details according to our customer’s information and complete the configuration settings.
The installation of our panel is complete. We can start using our panel by obtaining a license key.
We introduce our license file from the “Install Key” section as shown in the image.

Our license key can be a .zip file or just an activation code. Since we generally obtain it in .zip format, I used this method.

The licensing process is complete.

Our Plesk panel is generally ready for use. We can add our customers or websites and start using it. However, before adding our websites, we need to complete the DNS operations in our panel.
We go to “Tools & Settings” from the main menu on the right and enter the “DNS Template” settings.

We edit the standardly configured records according to our needs. As an example, we will configure NS addresses and A record;

ns1.ozgur.com 192.168.119.1
ns2.ozgur.com 192.168.119.2

In the default NS configuration, we click on the section that says domain.

We configure the NS address to which we will redirect the websites we will publish on our server. We perform the same operation for the other NS.
We create an A record for our IP address.

We enter the domain section on the default A record and perform the configuration as shown in the image.

After creating the same records for both IP addresses, our operations in the DNS template section are complete. If you want to enter a special record (MX, TXT), you can easily configure it from this section. If you make NS redirection from the domain registrar company for the websites you will open in your panel as shown above, your website will start working on your new server.

cPanel installation is done online. As with other control panels, it must be installed on a clean operating system. In this guide, we will see the installation steps including operating system settings.
When the CentOS operating system installation is complete and the server reboots, the login screen will appear.

We log in with the credentials we set during installation and type the “setup” command and press enter. When we log in, the following screen will appear. To complete the cPanel installation without issues, we first need to disable the firewall.

In our CentOS installation article, we defined the IP address during installation. To be more detailed, we will also explain the IP address assignment process;

We press Enter and enter the Device section. As seen in the image, we can see our ethernet card. Since we performed the installation on a virtual machine, you can see that a virtual ethernet is defined as the ethernet card. We define our IP address as shown below.

The IP address assignment process is complete. At this stage, we can test by pinging our IP address; if we have access, we can connect via putty and start the installation. We will continue the installation from here.

Before starting the installation, we need to perform a few more operations. We activate the ethernet card boot feature as explained in the CentOS 6.3 installation.

nano /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

service network restart

The installation settings related to the operating system are complete; we can now start the cPanel installation;

cd /home

We enter the directory and run the following command.

wget layer1.cpanel.net/latest

sh latest

After running this command as well, the installation will have started. Since the installation files are downloaded from abroad, it takes 2-3 hours.

The installation is complete. We restart our server and can now log in to our panel.
IPaddress:2086
Our server information and WHM panel login credentials are below. When we log in, we will encounter a screen like the one below.

We click “I Agree” and continue. We go to the Setup networking settings and define our email address. When there is an issue with your server, notification emails will be sent to this email address.

We define the hostname and continue by clicking save & go to step.

If we have more than one IP address to use in our panel, we can define them from this section.

In the Nameservers section, as mentioned in the WHM panel guide, if the NS addresses to be used on the server are known, we can make the definition. We can skip without making changes and perform the operations later.
We also skip the screen with service settings without making any changes and continue.

We click Finish to complete the pre-configuration settings. Our WHM panel is ready for use.

VMware ESX is an enterprise-scale server virtualization platform. The ESX/ESXi virtualization platform is not a system installed on top of an operating system like VMware Workstation, which we use for virtualization.
ESX/ESXi is a Linux-based standalone operating system; it is installed on your existing physical machine and uses hardware resources. For example, if you have a physical machine with 16 cores, 1 CPU, 32 GB RAM, and 2 TB HDD, you can create 15 machines inside this machine with 1 CPU each, 2 GB RAM, and 130 GB HDD, and you can create a network within them. Of course, the number of machines you can create can increase depending on your hardware resources.
We start our server by booting with our installation ISO via CD/DVD or USB drive.

We perform the boot operation from the mounted ESXi ISO by pressing the Enter key.

The relevant modules are being loaded before installation. The duration of this process will vary depending on the performance of your machine.

We continue the installation with the Enter key.

We accept the license agreement to continue the installation. We continue with the F11 key.

We see the existing disks on our server. If your disk is new, it should appear without issues; however, if a different operating system was previously installed on your disk, you need to completely reset your disk, otherwise your disk will not be visible. We select the disk we will install on and continue.

We select our keyboard language. I leave it as default and continue with Enter.

A password is required to connect to ESXi with the vSphere client. The password you provide here will be the root password. After entering the password, I continue with Enter. It is beneficial to make the password strong; otherwise, if hacked, you may lose all virtual servers inside the server. Also, password reset in ESX systems is quite difficult, so it should be a password you will not forget.

We start the installation by pressing the F11 key. The installation will take approximately 15 minutes.

The installation is complete. We complete the process by restarting our server. We define our IP address to provide access to our server.

We log in to our server with the credentials we defined during the installation phase and press F2 to configure our settings.

We define our IP address from the “Configure Management Network” section. When we get access, we can connect to our server with the VMware vSphere Client application and create virtual servers.

Since the Windows operating system installation is straightforward, it will not be explained with screenshots to avoid wasting time. We will talk about the settings that need to be done after the operating system is installed cleanly. You can find many documents on the installation of Windows Server and other operating systems by searching on Google.
After the installation is complete, the “Server Manager” interface appears.

We start the process for IP address assignment;

We add our IP address by navigating to the sections shown in the image. If we are going to install Windows updates or third-party software, it is important to assign DNS addresses to our server; otherwise, we will get errors during the installation of control panels or software.

Our server can now access the internet. Let us take a look at the other necessary settings;

From the Local Server tab, we disable the “Firewall” and “IE Enhanced Security Configuration” features. We temporarily disable the Firewall for remote desktop connection; it can later be re-enabled after allowing remote desktop through the firewall. The other feature, “IE Enhanced Security Configuration”, allows us to view pages through the browser without any restrictions. You can search online for detailed information.

We also activate the Remote Desktop feature and complete our operations on the virtual console for now. The subsequent steps will be done via remote desktop for ease of use.

If a control panel running on Windows systems is to be installed, it must be done after a clean operating system installation. Control panels are an important installation step as they manage many services. If you encounter an error, you will need to reinstall the entire system.

We download the ISO from the official CentOS website and start the installation of our server.

In this section, we will proceed by clicking “Install CentOS 7” and then the following screen asking us to select the installation language will appear.

I continue by selecting English to stay true to the original language of the operating system, but you can also install it in Turkish, though we do not recommend it. After selecting the language and continuing, the following unified screen designed to display all installation operations on a single screen will appear.

On this main screen shown above, basic Network settings, Keyboard language selection, Date and Time adjustments, and “Installation Destination” definitions determining which disk the installation will be performed on are made. First, to select the keyboard language as Turkish, let us click on the “Keyboard” tab in the left corner; this will bring up the following screen.

On this screen, we click the “+” icon in the bottom right corner to open the list of supported keyboard languages, find Turkish, and click “Add” to add it. This way, both English and Turkish will be added as keyboard layouts, but since we want to use Turkish as the default, we select Turkish and move it to the top of the list using the up arrow button below.

Then we click “Done” on this screen and return to the main screen. After defining the keyboard language, the next step is to perform network and system name definitions from the “Network & Hostname” tab located at the bottom right of the main screen. We enter the relevant section for this.

The network interfaces on our system are displayed on this screen shown above. One of the changes in version 7 of RHEL and therefore CentOS is that network interface names use a different naming schema from the old familiar ethX format; therefore, the only network interface on my system appears as eno167xxxx. Now we select this interface and click the button in the “Off” position in the upper right corner once to turn it “On” and enable the network interface. At this point, since there is a DHCP server on my network, I can obtain an IP without needing to configure a static IP; however, if you do not have DHCP, you can click the Configure button in the lower left corner of the relevant screen, go to the “IPv4 Settings” section in the top menu of the opened screen, make IP configurations similar to the following, and exit this screen by clicking save.

![cent7]https://kova1.ni.net.tr/warden/bilgi-bankasi/md0S7cDkTTV0AYpKeAL2TnFrNgipEw6ASRRQmzT1.png)

Finally, on the network configuration screen, we also define the hostname in the section located in the lower left corner, complete the operation with the “Done” button at the top, and return to the main installation screen.

Now, what remains to complete the installation is the Date and Time setting and the definitions specifying which disk the installation will be performed on. First, let us enter the “Date & Time” section to configure the time settings.
The definitions on this screen shown above are to select your city/region from the map and to turn the “Network Time” feature in the upper right corner from “Off” to “On”. Let us do these operations and then, as always, click “Done” to return to the previous screen.
Now, finally, we will complete the disk configuration. For this, we enter the “Installation Destination” section;
On this screen, of which you can see an example on the side, the disk or disks in your system will be listed and you will be asked to determine which one you want to install on. Since there is only one disk in my system, I select it by clicking on it once. After selecting the disk, we determine how disk partitioning will be done. You have two options here: you can go with the default “Automatically configure partitioning” option to let CentOS do the disk partitioning automatically, or you can say “I will configure partitioning” to manually determine the disk layout according to your needs. Automatic partitioning will make a default definition in LVM structure using the entire disk and will be quite sufficient if you do not have specific requirements. For this reason, we select automatic configuration and click “Done”.

After this final step, all initial configuration operations required for the installation process are completed and finally we start the installation with the “Begin Installation” button located at the bottom right of the main installation screen;

With the start of the installation, the following screen will appear, showing the installation progress on one hand while listing the configuration sections where you can set your root password and add a user to the system on the other;

At this stage, it is mandatory to set the root password for the installation to be completed. Therefore, we enter the relevant section and define the password for the root user;

After clicking “Done” on the above screen, the “Finish configuration” button will appear on the main screen you return to. We click the Finish configuration button and the final operations related to the installation such as creating initramfs and editing the bootloader are performed.

After the relevant process is completed, we complete the installation by rebooting our system.

Ubuntu is a free and open-source Linux-based operating system. It is developed for computers, servers, and smartphones. The Ubuntu project was launched with the aim of making Linux and free software a part of the daily lives of computer users, and its first stable desktop version was released in October 2004. With more than 40 million users today, Ubuntu’s desktop version is the most widely used desktop Linux distribution in the world. We will cover the installation steps using the Ubuntu 16.04 Server version.
When you start the computer with the Ubuntu DVD or USB drive you created, the installation screen below will greet you after a few minutes.
When we select the Turkish language option from the list on the left, the options to try and install Ubuntu appear as shown in the image. Here we continue by clicking the “Install Ubuntu” option.

On the screen below, a check for sufficient disk space and an internet connection check are performed. If an internet connection is not automatically established at this stage, you can establish the network connection (wireless, etc.) by clicking the network settings button in the upper right corner of the screen. An internet connection is not required for installation, but if an internet connection is established, Turkish language packages will be automatically downloaded and installed. Of course, you can also install the language packages yourself after installation.

Download updates while installing: If you check this option, the installation process will take longer depending on your internet connection speed. It is still recommended to download and install updates during installation.

Install this third-party software: This option installs the necessary plugins to play MP3, Flash video, and other media in Ubuntu, as well as TrueType fonts such as Times New Roman and Arial, and some other plugins. Since all these plugins are not included in the Ubuntu installation file due to restrictive characteristics in their licenses, they can be installed during installation or after installation. If you do not install these third-party software during installation, you can install them later through the Synaptic Package Manager (the name of this plugin is “ubuntu-restricted-extras”). Now we have reached the most important stage of the installation.

If Windows is already installed on your computer, a screen like the one above will appear at this stage.

If no operating system is installed on your computer, a screen like the one above will appear.
Install Ubuntu alongside Windows: This option is for users who want to install Ubuntu alongside Windows on a computer that already has Windows installed without removing it. Installing Ubuntu alongside Windows without removing it can also be done using the “Something else” option at the bottom of this screen, but using that option is a bit complex and requires experience.

Replace Windows with Ubuntu: This option deletes Windows and the documents on your computer and installs Ubuntu in their place.

Encrypt the new Ubuntu installation for security: With this option, we can add a password to the installation to control access and interference by others.
Use LVM with the new Ubuntu installation: With this option, we install on a disk configured to be expandable in size. This does not require a special disk. If we make this selection, our disk will be configured with the ability to increase the disk size without harming the data in the future.

Something else: This option allows you to configure the disk in a way that is specific to your needs. Using this option is a bit complex and requires experience.
Let us proceed by checking the “Something else” option.

Then a disk partitioning table showing all current partitions of your hard disk and their properties will appear, similar to the one below.

As you can see in our example in the image, multiple operating systems are installed on my system. Now I will partition my 16 GB of free disk space and install Ubuntu.

The disk I will work on is dev/sdb. This section may be different for you. You may also be working on your main disk. I chose this section to explain since the disk is completely empty.
Now I select the “free space” section below the selected section in the image and press the “+” button at the bottom right.

A window like the one above appears. Let us explain this window a bit:

Size: This section is the size of the partition you will create. I will install Ubuntu in this section. Since this article is for educational purposes, I created 4400 MB of space for Ubuntu. Of course, this is up to you. You can create as much space as you want.

Type for the new partition: Two options appear here: “Primary partition” and “Logical Partition”. A maximum of 4 primary partitions can be created on a disk. However, a logical partition can be divided into many partitions within itself. For example, on a 16 GB disk you can create 4 partitions of 3 GB each. Because the disk supports this. But if you partition a section of the disk logically, it means you can later divide this section into as many partitions as you want. Again, in this article we will partition as a primary partition.

Location for the new partition: Although this section may not concern us much in the future, it is useful to know that it asks which side of the disk to partition.
How to use: This section asks what the file system of the partition to be allocated will be. Since we plan to install Ubuntu on this partition, we selected “Ext4 journaling file system”.
Mount point: For the disk partition where you plan to install Ubuntu, you must set this field to “/”. (This sign means root directory and is related to the Linux file system hierarchy…)

After making the relevant settings, press the OK button.
We have prepared the disk partition where we will install Ubuntu; now it is time to create a partition to be used as swap space.

Swap space: This is a partition that the operating system uses when computer memory is insufficient to compensate for the shortage. It may be advisable to allocate around 3 to 5 GB for swap space. Allocating a very large area for swap space will not provide any additional performance benefit.

I repeat the operations I did above to create a new partition for swap space purposes. While creating the partition, I fill in the relevant fields as shown and press the OK button again.

Since I have completed all operations without issues, I can press the “Install Now” button.

Then the screen comes where we will answer the question “Where are you?”. Here you can select “Istanbul” for Turkey.

Then the “Keyboard layout” selection screen appears. Here, under normal circumstances, our keyboard layout will be automatically determined, so we generally do not need to do anything. The “Detect Keyboard Layout” button here can also be used to detect the keyboard. For this, after clicking some Turkish characters on the keyboard, you can click this button to detect the keyboard.

At this stage, we enter the name of our computer and the name of our user account. If the password we set is at least 6 characters long and contains letters, numbers, ?-/ etc. characters, Ubuntu will approve our password and say “Good Password”.

Log in automatically: If you want to log in directly without entering your user password every time you open Ubuntu, you can check this option. Even if you do not check this option, you can enable automatic user login through System Settings after installing Ubuntu.

Require my password to log in: This is the opposite of the option above. This option is checked by default.

Encrypt my home folder: By checking this option, our user home directory under the /Home folder can be encrypted to control access by others.
Then when we use the “Continue” button, the “Install” screen that comes with the “System Installing” message starts the process to complete the installation.
When the installation is complete, we receive the “Installation Complete” message. After saying “Restart Now”, we can start using Ubuntu.