I originally switched my VPS from a provider in Thailand to a VPS provided by Server4you 24^th September 2021, but they announced to discontinue offering VPS in 2022.

I switched 27^th July 2022 to Contabo which is a German company running servers in all parts of the world. I chose server location Düsseldorf/Germany and Debian 11.4 as OS.

4 vCPU

8 GB RAM

200 GB SSD

32 TB outgoing traffic / month

Debian 11.4

SSH and VNC access

3 month is 13.72 Euro

My VPS was ready within 5 minutes after order placement

Login to the server via SSH as root

Install sudo, create the main user, and add him to the sudoers group

# apt install sudo
# adduser <user>
# vi /etc/group (add <user> to line "sudo:x:27:<user>")

change the machine name:

sudo edit /etc/hostname
sudo edit /etc/hosts

enable force_color_prompt=yes in file ~/.bashrc and /root/.bashrc

Configure SSH Access

Install UFW Firewall

Disable root login by changing file /etc/passwd from line 1 to line 2

root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
root:x:0:0:root:/root:/sbin/nologin

Install Apache

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install apache2

Install PHP - How To Install PHP (8.1, 7.4 & 5.6) on Debian 11

$ sudo apt install software-properties-common ca-certificates lsb-release apt-transport-https gnupg
$ sudo sh -c 'echo "deb https://packages.sury.org/php/ $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/php.list'
$ wget -qO - https://packages.sury.org/php/apt.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install php8.1 php8.1-mysql php8.1-sqlite3

Enable required modules

$ sudo a2enmod rewrite
$ sudo a2enmod ssl

Setup your virtual hosts

Create sub folders in /var/log/apache2 if you setup log files for the virtual hosts in sub folders

Install Let's Encrypt Certbot

Install ProFTP Server

Setup Configuration on Hosts for BackupPC

Root

$ sudo crontab -e
35 3 * * 6 certbot renew && /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install vim
$ sudo apt install zip
$ sudo apt install rename
$ sudo apt install rsync

Change visudo editor

$ sudo update-alternatives --config editor