…You see until very recently I’ve been running this blog on a shared-platform Red Hat Linux server which was maintained by the host’s engineers, and I had no such problems. Having been forced to switch to a dedicated server due to resource issues on the shared-platform server- Meaning that this blog was using over 50% of the RAM, and, at times, up to 50% of the CPU resources. – I am now told that it’s up to me solely to perform any software maintenance, and that if I need the assistance of the host’s (Fasthosts.co.uk) engineers, it’ll cost me £60.00 + VAT (Currently £ £69.00) per half-hour; chargeable by the half-hour.

Well I certainly am not paying that! £60 including VAT per hour is reasonable; but what they’re asking is extortionate: Basically they want £69 to spend 5 minutes or less editing a few lines of code. – And to my mind that’s a con: I’m not Microsoft or Sun Microsystems or something, and I can’t budget for that amount at this point in time.

The only answer , then, is to fix it myself. I have two tools to do this with currently: those being the host’s remote console; which breaks down in some way the middle of an operation every time, and I also have Putty. I want to also use phpMyAdmin; but, having spent several hours translating the setup instructions from the badly-written, poorly-spaced, badly punctuated semi-hieroglyphics of the Linux-ese dialect spoken by the writer, I’m stumped in a similar way on installing that too.

As a result of having mod_rewrite switched off I’ve had to change my URL structure to default. Now none of the existing search-engine listings can find any of my pages, + I’m not getting any brownie-points from them for decent easy-to-find URLs either.

I tried Pico for the very first time in Putty recently, in the hope that it would help me re-write the file at /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf , but all I got was a blank in the console, for whatever reason, rather than anything that I could edit.

So as I wrote before; I, as a total idiot when it comes to Linux, am seeking some advice in the form of a step-by-step idiot’s guide on every single thing that I need to do to accomplish this. The help of my readers would be greatly appreciated. I know I’m a noob, and whatever other Linux-ese insults the Linux-community wish to throw, so don’t bother: I’m just looking to get started using Linux properly: Isn’t using Linux what the Linux community want everyone to do; albeit in this case on a server?

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