Laurel Hosting Tutorials does not offer any type of web site hosting to the public, that’s not what we do here. The laurelhosting.com web domain is registered and owned by myself, Edward Kimmel which is hosted on my privately owned and administrated commercial grade Linux™ server. This is my personal training and learning development server that was completely built and configured by researching countless how-to web site tutorials that didn’t tell me the whole story or fit my purpose. It’s been pretty frustrating to be honest, but I can’t fault the authors of those web sites because technology is changing so quickly that what worked a year ago doesn’t work today, I plan to keep these tutorials up-to-date.

  I was using a VPS for a while but unfortunately the monthly price kept getting raised and my learning tool simply got too expensive for my learning environment. I’m just a hobbyist who enjoys learning how to make things work. Something I’ve explained in detail on my personal web site EAKsr.com which is hosted on my production hosting package using Ionos.com (Formally 1and1.com).

  If you have an interest in how to create and host your own web site, then hopefully you can learn from my tutorials. I’ve always used my Windows® PC and configured IIS to work with Perl and PHP as my local web site development and then upload the files to Linux servers at Ionos or the VPS I was paying for. I had to buy and pay for every development program I wanted to use. Well, unfortunate for me, after time support for older software gets discontinued and you are expected to purchase a completely new edition which in some cases can be pretty expensive. Just as I was about to change from using PHP to ASP and move to a Windows® server, ASP support ended! FrontPage was no longer supported! My web site encoding tool simply vanished in thin air.

  Now I code my web sites the old fashion way using a simple text editor and a paper tablet to keep my notes handy. For over 30 years support for PHP and Perl has never ended, nor have I ever had to pay a price to use it. I have had to learn newer syntax and change the way I did things at times, but I’m still using scripts I created back in the early 90’s. Now that Windows® bulks at me for wanting to install software that didn’t come from the Windows® Online Store I felt it’s time for a change in my life. Played with Fedora, Ubunto, Debian and CentOS and found that Debian seems to work the best for me. So I’ll focus most of my tutorials using the free Debian operating system and software packages.

  Now that I am administrating my very own server I’m quickly learning about hackers and what they do. I now have complete access to my server and can see if all of the log files what is being attempted. Now that I can see all of the attacks, I am modifying my code to look for these evil doers and I’ll try to pass these tips and tricks on. My first tip if you are going to attempt what I am doing. Invest into a good router. The majority of my attacks stop there! Only open and forward the ports your server needs to function and then you will only have to deal with vulnerability attacks. My second tip is to keep your server up to date by running daily update checks.