In reply to David McCan.

Hi David, thanks for the comment. Any guide to running a server, squeezed within the confines of a blog comment, is doomed to be incomplete, but Paul was asking for advice on how to get started. I believe I pointed him in good direction, one that will enable to overcome the barrier that prevents most people from even investigating the possibilities: fear.

I only recommended Linode because they provide a push-button Webuzo installation, and I only suggested Webuzo because that makes pretty much everything else push-button. I said 3 hours because that will be enough to give him an overview of what might be involved. Webuzo has a free trial and Linode for those 3 hours will cost him five cents ... he can think of it as an investment.

At the end of those 3 hours, he will have something to contrast against his previous experience with CPanel. He will either decide that he does not want to take on the extra complexity or he will be hooked by the realisation that his work can potentially be faster and more effective if he takes control of this layer of the stack.

That will be sufficient incentive for his to spend a few more evenings running through the many excellent tutorials on securing your server, server-level caching etc, allowing him to move confidently forward from both Linode and Webuzo. I don't accept that learning how to competently manage a server would take more than a week of 3-hour evening sessions.

Incidentally, you asked the question "Are you confident that you have setup IP Tables, Fail2Ban, TripWire, SSL cert etc correctly" ... let me flip on that its head and ask you: why are you so sure that the low-wage, inexperienced kid hired by your hosting company knows what he is doing? I would argue that, following tutorials and, of course, running the included tests which confirm you have completed the steps correctly, allows you to be far more confident.

Incidentally, if you think I am joking or exaggerating the possibility of hosting company staff messing up, I am not. The bulk of my earnings over the past decade have come from mopping up after the spectacularly bone-headed actions of hosts, including the supposed WordPress experts, and they are steadily getting worse, not better.