A couple of days, I made a post on how to install ISPConfig on CentOS Linux. On my part, the install went great except for a little problem with BIND. The server on which I installed ISPConfig is mainly used for testing purposes so it didn’t have BIND (name server daemon) running properly. To fix this, I had to install and run “system-config-bind”:

# yum install system-config-bind

This configuration utility has to be run from a graphical environment. Upon it’s first execution, it will create a default /etc/named.conf file. After I’ve done that, I could start the “named” service and everything worked perfectly.

Adding A Website With ISPConfig

Start by logging into ISPConfig at http://[yourserver]:81 or https://[yourserver]:81.

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Everybody wants to squeeze as much performance of their Web applications as possible. Usually, advanced skills can be required to achieve considerable results although there might a few settings here and there that may try tweaking before hiring an expert.

Enabling Server Compression

This week we’ll begin with server compression. The HTTP protocol supports compression of the data that is sent between the Web server and the browser. Practically all browsers in use support HTTP compression. The compression algorithms work particularly well on text data like HTML, CSS and Javascript.

If you can enable HTTP compression on your Apache Web server, usually that is much simpler solution. It is also more efficient than bothering with keeping minimized versions of all the Javascript libraries that you need.

The mod_deflate module provides the DEFLATE output filter that allows output from your server to be compressed before being sent to the client over the network. You can enable this module by editing /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and add the following line:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml

Save the configuration file and restart the web server:

 service httpd restart

This will compress only a few file types (html, plain text and xml). Of course you can also compress other file types. I strongly suggest you head over to Apache’s website for more information.

• mod_deflate for Apache HTTPD Server 2.0
• mod_deflate for Apache HTTPD Server 2.2

I still got a few optimization tips up my sleeve from which I hope to make a little series of posts so stay tuned for more.

If you ever tried to manage your web server manually (i.e.: modifying each configuration files, restarting services, etc.) you’ve probably already realized it’s unrealistic to work this way. Fortunately, there are quite a few great web hosting control panels like DirectAdmin, cPanel, Plesk, vDeck and many others. The thing with these control panels is that they are quite expensive, especially if you’re planning to buy a lifetime license.

If you want to save your money, there is also the ever popular Webmin, but in my opinion this control panel is totally overkill if you don’t need to manage the whole operating system from a web interface. And for those who know little or nothing about system administration, they’ll just get lost in Webmin.

This is why I prefer using some free control panels dedicated to web hosting only. They sure aren’t as secure, flexible or powerful as the commercial products (or even Webmin for that matter), but they can handle the job very well if you do not intend to provide a control panel to your customers. While there are a handful of free control panels, today we’ll try ISPConfig.

ISPConfig is nice free control panel written in PHP. It uses its own copy of Apache HTTP server on port 81. It’s currently available as version 2.2.16 and has been around at least a couple of years although I don’t know exactly when it came out.

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