What does a VPS look like?

[davidbrady]

Folks,

I recently moved us from a shared hosting environment hosted by GoDaddy to a Virtual Private Server (VSP) hosted by HostUS. So, what does a VPS look like? Here it is: . You can see we're running the Debian distro of Linux and more specifically version 7.2 code named Wheezy.

Once logged in, Linux spawns a shell which gives us a command line prompt allowing us to execute operating system commands. In the attached pic you can see I entered a command to list all the files in the WanderlodgeGurus directory. That's our website! You can see the directories labeled: "database", where our wanderlodge user manuals along with 5.7GB and 4300 files of documentation are kept; "gallery", which contains our coppermine photo gallery and which supplies the photos to our "Recent Gallery Photos" banner; and the "inc" directory holds all of our plugins which make our "Latest News" and "Recent Posts" plugins work; the rest are files required for MyBB which is our forum software.

I can enter a command to list all the processes which are running:

Here you can see the processes handling our MySQL database queries and the apache2 processes handling our HTTP requests. The VPS runs a linux OS image in a virtual operating system world most likely running on VMSware; on top of that I loaded software packages to handle our HTTP requests (Apache), the MySQL relational database, the PHP programming language interpreter, and lastly MyBB our application program. All of this is currently consuming about 12GB of disk space! Guess what? All of these software packages are free and open source!

That's it!