First and foremost let me say that I am not good around a terminal. The format leaves me feeling very lost and confused, everything is floaty and impossible to keep in place, it’s easy to loose track of information and I have an extremely difficult time with regard to remembering sequences of letters and numbers so using a terminal hits all my language deficit issues.
So, in order for me to be able to manage my VPS at all, clear language and Exact Step By Step instructions with the EXACT syntax and EXACT line of everything I need to plug into the terminal to make things work, is absolutely vital for me to be able to navigate and understand what is going on. Consistently, Digital Oceans have provided resources for me that very few documentation resource have:
You don’t even have to use their services, all tutorials are public and do not require an account. They cover the vast majority of operating systems and explain things well. I have rarely found a tutorial on any other resource directory that was better than what they offer.
So many other guides/tutorials/documentations leave out vital information or steps under the assumption the reader their speaking to has an innate familiarity with the terminal and all the options available which I very much do not (or I do know of them, but my inability to remember sequences of letter/numbers has caused me to forget how to spell the whole syntax and thus cannot do anything by memory at all)
I honestly would not be able to manage my VPS at all without these resources because even the documentation provided directly by Debian or Apache do not cover everything I need to know in such a clear cut and easy to understand manner. If you’re ever at a loss for how to do something or starting out using a VPS I cannot recommend them enough. They’re the whole reason why when I was left alone with a VPS I had no idea how to manage I was actually able to get a sense of ‘wait… I can do this…’
Also, speaking of general good documentation/tutorials Shoutout to Redbot to having one of the cleanest and easiest-to-understand tutorials for their service and wonderfully robust and fully referenced documentation.
To that end, do any of you here have any knowledge of websites with stellar documentation for VPS management that is friendly to beginners? Or self-hosted applications like Redbot that have excellent internal documentation to help both with install and trouble shooting? Please drop them here, I’d like to accumulate more resources for terminal-illiterate individuals like myself to be able to have more confidence and less fear navigating the environment.
This thread may be of interest to you (if you haven’t seen it):
I recently purchased and have been reading:
I am quite preferable to “beginner’s eye” guides as well. I like to say it’s cause I’m a teacher, but the truth is I’m just a “master of none”.
Anyways, as I was following along and saw how the VPS providers just create them effortlessly from thin air (and then charge me ~$5 a month for a single one!), I thought: “Could I do that?” And that led me to:
And I’ve been having a blast this week lighting up instant “VPSs” on my Raspberry Pi, attempting software installs to my hearts content, failing miserably, and just trying again because creating and destroying is just THAT easy (and free!). Which leads me…
I think any-thing/time you spend trying / struggling is totally absolutely helping you! And we all have our ways… b-u-t, I do worry that mindset could do you a bit-a harm. I think, especially when we’re learning, that kinda rigidity can be limiting. I always remind my students: “Failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of it.” Something I appreciate from Mr. Westfall’s (love to see a Personal Site) book is how frequently he acknowledges ambiguity, uncertainty, no guarantees. Mistakes, misconceptions, obstacles! They have value, knowledge, opportunity! Disregarding the less-documented, the less-friendly, could end up preserving your fear, rather than overcoming it.
Lol, anyways, I recommend Incus; or similar, like: LXD or Proxmox
As I tried to emphasize, I’m very bad at remembering sequences of letters and numbers I’ve struggled with terminals ever since we had DOS in the household, I would, and still do, forget minute details in strings of text and it is unforgiving for ‘near misses’.
I often have to keep WinSCP open the same time I do terminal work and actually look at the folders so that I can see what’s happening to them in order to create visual anchors with what I’m doing in the terminal. It’s like how dial tones were easier for me to remember than a 10 digit phone number. (yes, I was only able to reliably call anyone because I was re-creating the dial tone, and not the number)
Mistakes and obstacles have value only if I can understand what happened in the process Of what I’ve installed on my server the ones I struggled with most (Icecast and a PHP-based Gemini server) I actually… cannot tell you what I did to fix that because it involved so much floundering and eventually enlisting the help of a friend that the distress has clouded much of what I would learn and all I remember is seas of text that look like nothing to me. If I were to set them up again I would likely hit the same walls and need the same help all over again. By contrast, things I set up with good documentation when I got stuck I had places I could look to, to troubleshoot on my own and those are the things that I have actionable memory of, because I had the visual of the tutorial to overlay/anchor with the memory of the instructions I placed in the terminal, in addition to documentation that explained what I was doing, what was happening, and all the components being used in the process.
Now, is a lot of this compounded by the fact that I don’t know a lot of basics about terminals or Linux? Yes, I won’t deny that. Veronica Explains has been an absolute blessing in the realm of teaching various Linux functions and the combination of both audio and visual anchors helps provide me means of recall. And there’s always a reference there available. But this boils down to what is needed to help people actually get to this point: Good Documentation, and Good Tutorials that incorporate all contextual and relevant details as those help anyone new have the tools they need to troubleshoot in the first place.
This is why I asked for the sharing of beginner accessible tools, documentation, and resources for the purpose of running a VPS by terminal.