I purchased a couple of VPS’s from IONOS last month. I chose the $5 a month offering. What I received was a Linux VPS with a couple XEON cpus, 2 gigabytes of RAM, and 80 gigabytes of hard drive space. I wanted to build a couple of Ubuntu 20.04 Servers with LAMP stacks to run some common web applications, namely WordPress and Mediawiki (the Wikipedia software). After a little online research I chose IONOS based on cost and available features.

After filling out their online form and giving over the credit card details, I received an email 20 minutes later notifying me that the system was ready and I could log in. During the payment process an account is set with up with IONOS and you provide some login details for the VPS. I logged into their cloud and was presented with an intuitive web interface. System->My system->Root password. Next to it was the IP address.

I fired up my ssh client, Putty in this case, and logged into my system. BAM. The world was my oyster and this was a game I knew how to play.

I needed to get wordpress going so I could get up a website or two. I would start by installing wordpress as it installs apache2 as a prerequisite. I then needed php and mysql. With a little further configuration the LAMP stack would be complete and I’d be able to start the browser based portion of of the installation.

Getting that portion of the installation done is essential in getting the browser portion going. If you fire up the browser and nothing happens it can be frustrating. Installing the software itself is not usually a big issue. Much of the configuration is done upon downloading of the software from the repository via the automated installation tool.

The issue is usually the configuration files and permissions issues. But as I’ve gathered much experience over the years installing the LAMP subsystem, getting all the software installed and editing all the configuration files is something I can practically do in my sleep.

All in all my initial impression with IONOS/1and1 is good. Their account creation and VPS configuration interface was intuitive, they were responsive and I had a new Linux VPS running WordPress a couple hours later.

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