VPS Guide

Contents

VPS-20

Radified

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Guide to Virtual Private Servers: VPS Web Hosting Providers: Page 19

VPS Guide

Contents

VPS-20

Radified

Forums

Blog

Guide to Virtual Private Servers: VPS Web Hosting Providers: Page 19

Connecting to a Virtual Private Server via SFTP / SSH Secure Shell

If you're anything like me, the first thing you'll want to do after moving your site to a Virtual Private Server is » determine if the upgrade was really necessary .. or whether your Shared web host was just trying to get more money out of you.

In other words, you'll want to determine your resource usage .. because that's the thing which most likely forced you to move.

But first, let's take a step back and get you a good Secure FTP client, since we now have ROOT access. (Yeah, baby.) Techs at WiredTree recommend » WinSCP.

It's free (open source), and frequently updated. Only thing I don't like is that it normally requires a reboot following each upgrade. So plan accordingly.

In the past (with Shared web hosting), I've used many different FTP clients, such as CuteFTP($), SmartFTP (free for personal use)n and FileZilla (Open Source).

But I really like WinSCP. It comes with Pageant, a PuTTY authentication agent (whatever the heck that is), and PuTTY itself, which we'll use to monitor our server's use of resources. PuTTY is what's known as a terminal emulator. (We're gettin' into some tall cotton now.)

Best VPS Web Hosting Provider

SFTP stands for » SSH File Transfer Protocol, or Secure FTP).

PuTTY is an SSH client (Secure SHell) that is accessed while in/using WinSCP by selecting » Open in PuTTY from the Commands menu. I prefer using PuTTY from WinSCP over the stand-alone version because WinSCP will pass your stored log-in info to PuTTY (user name and password), whereas as the standalone version requires you to enter it manually.

PuTTY is a command-line interface. If you've been using Windows forever, it may take some getting used to. If you've ever used DOS, you should have no problem.

Don't let the simple interface fool you. The command line is where all the power is accessed from. The WiredTree techs all used to fix all my problems. But it takes a while to learn the commands.

Monitoring Resource Usage at Your VPS

PuTTY uses the secure shell (SSH) protocol. You can find how much memory you're using by typing » free -m at the command prompt and hitting the enter key. Zac says:

"top" is probably the main one you'd want to use. top and free are the two most useful for monitoring resource usage. You can do a lot with top. For example, shift+M will sort process by memory use when you are in it, and shift+P will sort by CPU usage. mytop will get you MySQL stats.

I had a problem once with WinSCP launching PuTTY (executing putty.exe) after I upgraded my copy of ZoneAlarm firewall. I had to go into ZoneAlarm and tell it both WinSCP and PuTTY were friendly. Then PuTTY would again launch from within WinSCP.

This page is not yet done. I'll try to finish it later this week. This guide (like *all* guides) is taking longer to complete than I anticipated. =/

NEXT » Essential Command Line Shell Commands for Linux-based Virtual Private Servers (VPS)

For more along these lines, here's a Google search preconfigured for the query » virtual private server monitoring vps resource usage

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