How to Create your FREE VPS

Create you Free VPS

Have you ever wanted to create your own VoIP server? Perhaps have some available storage in the cloud you can access from anywhere in the world? Maybe you wish to have your own website. Well then setting up a VPS would be perfect for you and what better way to do this with a free VPS?

While there are many free VPS options out there I have gone with host1free. They offer:

• 128mb of RAM
• 348mb of VSwap
• 10gb of disk space
• Unlimited bandwidth

To sign up for their service go to http://members.host1free.com/vps?ac=h1f_register_vps and fill out the details. I suggest using CentOS 6 as this is the version I am using in this post. It can take up to a week for the server to be fully set up for you however it only took 24 hours for me to get an email stating my server was ready to go. Be sure to use a valid email address as details about how to log are sent here.

Initial Setup

Once you have been sent your log in details and logged in your page should look similar to this:

Congratulations, your server is running and you have access to the control panel!

The control panel gives you an overview of what is happening on your server. If you ever have any issues and break the server, pressing the Reinstall button will allow you to start from scratch, as well as choose other OS's you may wish to try.

The first step to using your server is to set the root and console passwords. This is simply done by clicking the Root Password tab in the Controls section and setting a new password. While you are doing this feel free to click through the other tabs to see what controls are available to you, you might find something useful in there I overlook in this blog.

Connecting to the Server

Now that the server is up and running and you have set the root password you probably wish to connect to it so you can start using the server. To do this you need software that allows you to connect to the server via SSH. I am using Putty which you can download from here. Putty is a powerful SSH and Telnet client which you will spend a lot of your time using. It is a stand alone application so there is no need to install anything and it can be run from portable devices such as flash drives.

Opening Putty will show this screen:

To connect to the server leave everything at their default setting and enter the IP address of the server in the Host Name box. To find the IP address of your server go to the control panel and on the main page the IP address is the second row from the top. Then click Open and a console screen should appear.

The console screen will ask which user to log in as, type in root. You will then be prompted to enter the password which will be the password that you set up when you changed the root password. After you enter this in you will have successfully logged into the server. You now have full access to your server to do as you wish. 

What now?

Updating

Before you go off and start running your website or installing your FTP server I suggest you update the installed software to the latest version. To do this enter.

yum update

yum allows you to install, update and remove software on your server. After typing this command the server will check for updates. You will be prompted a few times if you wish to continue. When prompted type y and press enter to accept the changes. Let the server update and you will be notified when it is complete.

User Accounts

My final suggestion before you start using the server to install software is to set up a user account. Currently you are logged in as root which has complete access to everything. While this may sound good it can easily kill your server if you enter a command incorrectly.

Adding a new user is easy. Enter the command below, replacing <username> with your name.

useradd <username>

You have now created the user however you need to assign a password. Enter the command below, replacing <username> with the name you used above.

passwd <username>

If the password was correctly changed you should see

passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.

output to the console. 

Now you can open a new console window and log in as the user you just created. You can create as many users as you wish for any people who will be using the server.

You have now successfully signed up, created and updated your server and it is ready to use. If you have any questions or comments feel free to add a comment.

Hope this helped!