Siddhant Minocha's Blog - Find easy hacks on Java, Ubuntu, Wordpress and other crazy things!

You have bought a new VPS and you want to host your first website? Read on!

I recently bought a brand new VPS which had CentOS pre-installed. Here's how I hosted my first website on CentOS and a new VPS server which had nothing installed.

I had to browse a lot of internet to find a solution and hence here I share how I did it.

First, I installed ZPanel on my server. ZPanel is an alternate to CPanel for people like me who cannot afford CPanel. ZPanel is an open-source solution and it works like magic.

Before installing ZPanel please make sure your system doesn't have PHP or MySQL installed. ZPanel installs both of them and a lot more services automatically. These services can clash with the process and your installation can stop in between.

Chances are, like me, you might be browsing the internet for a long time and you might have installed both these apps along with others too! I would recommend you to reset your VPS. Look in the panel provided by your host, there's always an option to reset VPS to installation settings.

So, to install ZPanel, you'll have to download it first to your home directory. You can do this by logging in to the SSH of your server. After logging in run this command:

yum -y update

After updating your system, download the file using the following command:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zpanel/installers/master/install/CentOS-6_4/10_1_1.sh

After downloading, you'll have to change permissions of the file which you can do by running:



chmod +x 10_1_1.sh

And finally execute the installer by running:



./10_1_1.sh




This will install ZPanel on your Server. You'll get passwords and some important stuff printed in your console. Don't forget to save that in a file.

After ZPanel has been installed, you can access it using your IP address.

This is how your home screen will look like after you log in.

Now after successful installation of ZPanel, its time to add a new domain. You can do this by clicking the Domains option in Domains module of the home screen.

You'll get a screen similar the one above.

Now, Add your own domain and click on "Create a new home directory" option.

After your domain has been added, click on DNS Manager under Domains module.

Select your domain and click edit. You'll see all the DNS entries for your domain.

Click on "NS" and copy the NS Records of your website.

Now, go to your Domain Provider's website and access the panel provided to you by your domain provider. Click on the domain you want to host and check its configuration. Under the domain configuration, you'll get the option to save Name Servers. 

Use the newly created Name Servers for your domain and wait until your domain name propagates.


Your new website will be functional in 30-60 minutes.

There's a good news for web developers, bloggers, white hats and general internet users and there's a bad news for hackers, black hats, spammers and some of my friends. :p

Google is finally saying bye to the old, irritating and difficult captcha. They are introducing a new captcha which will differentiate between humans and bots in just one click.

This amazing move by Google might reduce spamming (There's no way on earth to stop spamming.) The system uses image recognition as the method for keeping bots away. You might see a picture of an object, then asked to select similar photos from a grid to verify you’re a human. The images on the grid aren't the same object, humans can easily solve these kinds of puzzles, bots can't.
There are a lot of websites that are already using such techniques. I have seen a few websites that ask you to solve a small jigsaw puzzle before proceeding.

Here's an example of Snapchat's Captcha:

Here are a few facts about Captcha:

Millions of CAPTCHAs are solved by people every day. reCAPTCHA makes positive use of this human effort by channeling the time spent solving CAPTCHAs into digitizing text, annotating images, building machine learning datasets. This in turn helps preserve books, improve maps, and solve hard AI problems.
reCAPTCHA improves Google's knowledge of the physical world by creating CAPTCHAs out of text visible on Street View imagery. As people verify the text in these CAPTCHAs, this information is used to make Google Maps more precise and complete. So if you're a Google Maps user, your experience (and everyone else's) will be even better.
reCAPTCHA helps solve hard problems in Artificial Intelligence. High quality human labelled images are compiled into datasets that can be used to train Machine Learning systems. Research communities benefit from such efforts that help build the next generation of groundbreaking Artificial Intelligence solutions.
reCAPTCHA digitizes books by turning words that cannot be read by computers into CAPTCHAs for people to solve. Word by word, a book is digitized and preserved online for people to find and read.

This PasteBin is a demo code of how captchas can be used: http://pastebin.com/B2ccx5ry

Every time you solve a Captcha, you create something new. Lots of Love :D

How to start your own website using ZPanel in Cent OS!

You have bought a new VPS and you want to host your first website? Read on!

Captchas - The new one and the old one. Google introduces new captcha.

Here's some coffee for your Ubuntu. Install Caffeine and stop your Ubuntu from going to sleep or screensaver.

Speed up your Ubuntu System instantly. This little app will decreas app loading time by seconds.