So, you’ve registered your domain and have your Linux VS ready to roll, what’s next? Well, rather than wrestle with the bottomless world of hardcore geekdom at the convoluted CLI you could do a lot worse than install the ECHP domain management tool.

EHCP is open source and thus free to download and use, it comes very well supported and the website supplies what could be THE all time best procedural “How To” for installation I have ever come across (if you excuse the ‘interesting’ english) with clickable “Yes/No” confirmation checks and resulting problem resolves after each stage (admittedly the ‘concept’ sections aren’t as yet fully complete). Install is as follows..

sudo apt-get install wget
wget www.ehcp.net/download
tar -zxvf ehcp_latest.tgz
cd ehcp
./install.sh
#

..it’s an incredibly long old install (seemingly at least three to four times longer than a base server install alone) and you’re asked various bits and bobs along the way so pay attention (MySQL passwords etc), however it’s all nothing too major and to be honest if you’re at a stage of wanting to manage your own domain hosting you’ll more than likely be at an easy level of suitable technical knowledge to cope with both the install and later domain import and configuration, if not you’ll work it out.

Once installed you access the admin interface through http://”your IP number“/ (if you haven’t fully configured base domain & DNS access it will tell you and either click through or use http://”your IP number“/vhost/ehcp/ then once in resolve things alongside the main domain config), username is “admin” and the password will be one you created during the setup.

An interesting point of note which could speed things along during later LAMP installs is that EHCP installs phpMyAdmin for you, which is useful, useful also are the included modules for eMail, FTP & MySQL services & config, however it’s the “Easy Add”, “Bulk Add” and “DNS Only” domain click throughs which are the bread and butter, or there again, you could always wrestle with the command line for days on end (personally I’d rather use the time more productively to drink beer and watch TV).