Millwood Online

This blog post will guide you through how to setup your own web server, with a lovely fresh copy of Drupal on it. The first thing you will need is somewhere to host your web server, I have chosen VPS.net. Their servers start from as little as £15.

Step one - purchasing and provisioning a server

One of the great things about Drupal is that you can run more that one site off one installation. This saves disk space and load on your server, it also saves maintenance time. With only one installation to manage and update the time spent administering your site drops greatly.

So, how do you setup a multi-site? well, it’s very easy.

1. Firstly install Drupal as you would normally. Download it into your web root, copy the settings.php file, add a files directory, setup a database. etc. The domain name for this site for example would be http://www.example.com.

All of my current web sites are hosted on a VPS from CheapVPS which came with CentOS and HostInABox installed. This is all good for a novice web site admin to setup a few sites, but I wanted to learn more.

Over the weekend I found out how to get thousands of visitors to my site.

1. Find a topic teenagers will like
2. Blog about said topic
3. Moderate the comments

That's all there is too it.

Many of my post on my blog have been a little geeky, about Apple, the iPhone or Drupal. These are not mass market topics. When I blogged about the Sunday Times Rich List my visitors for that day went for an average 30 a day up to 150. When I blogged about Britain's Got Talent my visitors for Sunday 1st June rocketed up to 2000.