Setting Up A LAMP Server On Centos 6

Brent W

Well-known member
I use Rackspace Cloud Servers for hosting and fire up new instances every now and then to do some testing. I've documented the process for me to get this up and running as fast as possible.

Disclaimer: I don't care if you think I should use something other than Apache. It works perfectly fine for me.

APACHE SERVER DEPENDENTS
yum install gcc pcre-devel

PHP REQUIREMENTS
yum install libxml2-devel libcurl-devel libjpg-devel libpng-devel libXpm-devel freetype-devel t1lib-devel gmp-devel

MySQL 5.5.x
Info here: http://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2010/install-mysql-on-fedora-centos-red-hat-rhel/

Apache config.nice
Code:
#! /bin/sh
#
# Created by configure
 
"./configure" \
"--with-mpm=prefork" \
"--with-included-apr" \
"$@"

PHP config.nice
Code:
#! /bin/sh
#
# Created by configure
 
'./configure' \
'--with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs' \
'--with-mysql=/usr' \
'--with-mysqli=/usr/bin/mysql_config' \
'--with-gd' \
'--with-freetype-dir=/usr' \
'--with-png-dir=/usr' \
'--with-xpm-dir=/usr' \
'--enable-gd-native-ttf' \
'--with-t1lib=/usr' \
'--with-gettext' \
'--with-gmp' \
'--with-iconv' \
'--with-jpeg-dir=/usr' \
'--with-openssl' \
'--with-pcre-regex' \
'--with-zlib' \
'--with-layout=GNU' \
'--enable-exif' \
'--enable-ftp' \
'--enable-calendar' \
'--with-libxml-dir=/usr' \
'--with-curl' \
'--with-libdir=lib64' \
"$@"

If this helps someone great. If not then oh well I guess :)
 
Hopefully this will help someone get a VPS set up and going. Perhaps you could add some explanation on how to tune Apache and/or MySQL.
Only other thing I would recommend is to not use Rackspace. They are terribly overpriced compared to other high quality hosts.
 
Hopefully this will help someone get a VPS set up and going. Perhaps you could add some explanation on how to tune Apache and/or MySQL.
Only other thing I would recommend is to not use Rackspace. They are terribly overpriced compared to other high quality hosts.

Such as? I'm not just paying for the server(s). Their infrastructure, backend and support as well.
 
Do you have their managed support or just normal unmanaged? I think both are overpriced, but their full management is slightly more worth it from what I've seen/read (have not used it myself).
As for unmanaged, I think that both Linode and Storm on Demand/Liquid Web have infrastructures and hardware support that at least rivals Rackspace.

- Liquid Web owns and operates their own datacenters and has recently opened up a new one in Arizona to provide some geographical diversity.
- Linode colocates their equipment in a number of datacenters - four in the US, one in England, and one in Tokyo. Their stuff hosted in Dallas is with Softlayer, an extremely reputable provider with a massively impressive network.

If you do some quick searching on both of these companies, you'll find tons of great reviews and few dissatisfied customers. The main difference I like to stress is price. Here's a comparison:
To normalize the comparison, I'll take a VPS with 1 GB RAM from all providers (Storm does not have exactly 1 GB - it's about 860 MB, so keep that in mind).

Linode 1 GB: $39.95/month
Storm 1 GB: $35.00/month
Rackspace 1 GB: $43.80/month

Note that the Linode includes 400 GB of outbound bandwidth in that price, whereas the other two do not. If I include 400 GB of bandwidth for all of them:

Linode 1 GB: $39.95/month
Storm 1 GB: $55.00/month
Rackspace 1 GB: $115.80/month

Linode charges $0.10/GB for bandwidth
Storm charges $0.05/GB for bandwidth
Rackspace charges $0.18/GB for bandwidth

I will wholeheartedly agree that Rackspace has an excellent infrastructure, however, their hardware last I saw was somewhat dated (AMD Opteron 2374 chips were still in heavy use last I saw), and they are not worth the huge premium they charge. I have used Slicehost after they were bought by Rackspace, I have used Linode, and I have used Storm on Demand, and I have no reason at all to use Rackspace cloud now.

Info on these prices was from here:

http://www.linode.com/
https://www.stormondemand.com/pricing/
http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/servers/pricing/
 
Do you have their managed support or just normal unmanaged? I think both are overpriced, but their full management is slightly more worth it from what I've seen/read (have not used it myself).
As for unmanaged, I think that both Linode and Storm on Demand/Liquid Web have infrastructures and hardware support that at least rivals Rackspace.

- Liquid Web owns and operates their own datacenters and has recently opened up a new one in Arizona to provide some geographical diversity.
- Linode colocates their equipment in a number of datacenters - four in the US, one in England, and one in Tokyo. Their stuff hosted in Dallas is with Softlayer, an extremely reputable provider with a massively impressive network.

If you do some quick searching on both of these companies, you'll find tons of great reviews and few dissatisfied customers. The main difference I like to stress is price. Here's a comparison:
To normalize the comparison, I'll take a VPS with 1 GB RAM from all providers (Storm does not have exactly 1 GB - it's about 860 MB, so keep that in mind).

Linode 1 GB: $39.95/month
Storm 1 GB: $35.00/month
Rackspace 1 GB: $43.80/month

Note that the Linode includes 400 GB of outbound bandwidth in that price, whereas the other two do not. If I include 400 GB of bandwidth for all of them:

Linode 1 GB: $39.95/month
Storm 1 GB: $55.00/month
Rackspace 1 GB: $115.80/month

Linode charges $0.10/GB for bandwidth
Storm charges $0.05/GB for bandwidth
Rackspace charges $0.18/GB for bandwidth

I will wholeheartedly agree that Rackspace has an excellent infrastructure, however, their hardware last I saw was somewhat dated (AMD Opteron 2374 chips were still in heavy use last I saw), and they are not worth the huge premium they charge. I have used Slicehost after they were bought by Rackspace, I have used Linode, and I have used Storm on Demand, and I have no reason at all to use Rackspace cloud now.

Info on these prices was from here:

http://www.linode.com/
https://www.stormondemand.com/pricing/
http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/servers/pricing/

Thanks for that detailed explanation :) I'll explore other alternatives maybe in the future.
 
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