Guide to Using a Windows Virtual Private Server to make your life easier

So I started using a VPS about a month ago when I hired my VA and wow is it helpful. I’m never going back especially because I intend to travel more soon and due to some software having limited licenses (such as AMR has a limit of only 2 computers per purchase or scrapebox 1 computer) I could not have all the software on my portable. Well, no longer because now with a VPS you can have everything wherever you go as long as you have an internet connection. And since these programs need an internet connection anyway it’s perfect. It’s also great that even if your home connection is slower for some reason the VPS is usually very stable and very quick, during a speed test mine shows at 30megs per second of download speed. I ordered it from thrust VPS because they seemed one of the cheapest around and I had friends recommend it to me. As much as I would like to refer the bigger hosting companies and they’re big affiliate payouts (I instead get $1 per person that signups to thrust :P), they are a LOT more expensive than thrust VPS. Some of the big hosting companies have VPS services with windows but usually they are more expansive for the amount of CPU/RAM . I started with the Mystic pack which has it’s features shown below:

$10.95 (US)(actually it seems to be a mistake, it’s $15 USD that will be charged to you at checkout)/ £10.95 (UK) – 1GB RAM, 1GB Swap, 30GB Disk Space, 1TB Transfer, 1 IP, UK or US – 1.2Ghz CPU

Was pretty good, however with 1 gig of ram I could not run sick submitter + scrapebox or with Article marketing robot very reliably. I was getting some out of memory errors so I eventually simply upgraded to a 2gb Ram which is below.
Metropolis $29.95  (this one did cost me $30) (US) / £29.95 (UK) – 2GB RAM, 2GB Swap, 65GB Disk Space, 2TB Transfer, 1 IP, UK or US – 2.4Ghz CPU

After upgrading I never had any out of memory issues. To be honest, I think the 1.5gb of ram one would have been enough but I intend to run SenukeX on this server soon so I wanted to make sure it would have enough room for when I give Senukex another try. I never liked SenukeX but I have an idea to maybe make it work for me now.

they have a $6 plan with 0.5gig of ram but I think that’s probably too low. Anyway, I recommend starting with the 1gig plan and if you want to upgrade it’s really simple to do so. You go to their upgrade interface and pay the difference between what you have and what you want to buy (same with downgrading).

It took me 2 days to configure it because I was missing simple instructions so I’ll share some of the key things with you about setting up windows 2008.

Make sure to enable remote desktop To start off with, after windows is installed on the VPS (took me an hour I think for someone to do it) log in to the VPS with the java panel they give you. However, you’ll notice this is SUPER SLOW AND LAGGY!! So before you go crazy you need to enable remote desktop on the VPS so you don’t go crazy. So go to the “server manager” (should be an icon to the right of the “start” icon) and click on remote deskptop and go to the tab remote and make sure it allows connections (I did a check on the second option of the 3).

While you’re here, disable the super annoying enhanced internet explorer security. I wasted hours on this until I found the stupid simple solution which is shown by the image under.

Disabling_internet_explorer_security on windows 2008
IP address of your thrust VPSOk, To get the ip address of your VPS it’s very simple and it’s shown to you when you login to your control panel which you already did to reach the java panel that lets you go on the very slow VPS.

 

 

OK, now go back to your main computer and open remote desktop and enter the IP address you found to connect to the computer. You’ll also have to enter the administrator (or user I guess) name and password that you created on the VPS after the windows installation. You should finally be on your VPS from your main screen and now it’s super fast and the resolution fits your normal screen :). At this point I install dropbox which is a cloud service that allows 2gb of space to be shared freely between users and computers that allows sharing. I have the same account on my main computer and portable and on the VPS. Add_a_VPS_folder_to_your_dropboxI installed another account of dropbox and shared a “VPS” folder between my main account (which is on both my personal computers) and the new account for the VPS (I made a new account mostly because I do not want people logging to the VPS have complete view of my main dropbox. BTW, if you use my dropbox links to signup, we both get an extra 250mb of space free :). Anyway, from now on when I want to transfer files from the VPS and my main computer I just upload the documents there. If you want to transfer larger files it’s probably best to upload them to a ftp of one of your websites and download it from your VPS but I won’t be showing how in this guide ( and I did not have to so far anyway, all the software you use for IM is usually under 100mb which is downloaded within minutes on the VPS).

Enabling desktope experience on windows 2008 for a virtual private serverAnyway, at this point you can play around with the VPS. I installed chrome because I do not like IE for browsing. However you still want to disable the security because a lot of software uses IE when they auto submit. I also enabled desktop experience as shown to the left in the image because I heard it helps software work well (I enabled it before checking to see if they would have given me an error without it). Some other things you might have to do include doing windows updates and installing .net framework 4.0+ and C++ tools off the microsoft website depending on what software you use.

Wow, this turned out to be a long post. Hope you guys enjoy, I honestly think that having a VPS is awesome.  I would probably start with the 1gig plan unless you want to use multiple software at the same time but I doubt most of you are doing that. Honestly I’m only doing this to try out some experiments on websites thanks to the time my VA frees up so running only 1-2 software on it like AMR + something else is going to be fine. I want to test again if I can rank websites with profile links, blog comments, web 2.0s etc even if they failed for me in the past. Or rather, while they can work, require ultimately much more effort then submitting articles with the software/services I share on my recommended link building tools page.