nginx vs. apache & general questions

[Jeremy]

So, I have a recently got a server where it is bare and has nothing (linode) and I plan on using it for a single site, one that hopefully will get a decent amount of traffic. Now, since it doesn't have anything installed on it, what do you think I should start out with: nginx or Apache?

Also, bear in mind my general server administration knowledge is bare minimum. I thought about purchasing a license to cPanel and installing it to manage things such as email, sub-domains, databases, etc. Or should I suck it up and attempt to manage everything without a control panel (minimal sub-domains / emails from the start, but will be added to later in the run of the site)?

Oh, this is going to be entirely based on XenForo (Blogs, site, forums, etc).

 

[MattW]

If it's currently bare bones, I'd go full nginx. If it's centos, try using centminmod to install and set it up.

 

[Jeremy]

If it's currently bare bones, I'd go full nginx. If it's centos, try using centminmod to install and set it up.

Its completely bare bones and I can install anyone of a selection of OSes. Any suggestion on which OS too?

 

[MattW]

CentOS 6.3 64Bit

 

[yavuz]

CentOS 6.3 64Bit

+ Virtualmin as a control panel. It's free and would be a decent choice if you want to free yourself from setup hussle.

 

[Jeremy]

+ Virtualmin as a control panel. It's free and would be a decent choice if you want to free yourself from setup hussle.

I thought Virtualmin had lots of issues. But very viable choice. Does it take up much space? I think I saw cPanel took up 10GB?

Will the install handle setting up email servers/MySQL servers?

 

[yavuz]

I thought Virtualmin had lots of issues. But very viable choice. Does it take up much space? I think I saw cPanel took up 10GB?

Will the install handle setting up email servers/MySQL servers?

I used it before and haven't had problems with it. It installed all the necessary components to host a website with mail, mysql, php and the other stuff I'm using cPanel now, because I have 15 websites on my server.

What I liked that, after I installed the operating system I just needed two line of code to ender you were done:

wget http://software.virtualmin.com/gpl/scripts/install.sh
sh ./install.sh

that was about it

There is also a nginx module if you like to switsch from apache but I didn't test it.