Free eBook, Building a Secure Wordpress Server (LAMP) with CentOS 7
Posted on 18 Aug 2017 by Ray Heffer
After writing a series of blog posts and guides on CentOS for several years now, as part of my Essential Linux Skills with CentOS 7 series, I have decided to publish a free eBook covering the complete guide on setting up your own highly secure web server for blogging (WordPress). Linux is still a hobby, and while it comes in handy for my day job, it has been long since I was a Linux administrator. I once remember someone describing it as an art.
While many of my readers and followers are highly skilled technical consultants and VMware architects, building and maintaining a secure and stable web server for WordPress can pose some challenges. For one, it requires a solid understanding of the Linux operating system and nuances of security with mechanisms such as SELinux. Also it takes time to learn, master and manage. However, I feel the many benefits outweigh these challenges and running your own WordPress blog can be very rewarding. One area I decided to focus heavily on is SELinux. It is often disabled and ignored, and often misunderstood.
Many of us are also on a budget, so simply using AWS Route53, some EC2 nodes and a load-balancer with CloudFront can be costly when considering egress bandwidth charges. I have used various VPS (Virtual Private Server) providers in the past, and recently decided to move back to Linode. I was a customer for several years until I moved to another provider following their Twelve Days of Crisis nightmare. However, the fact that Linode have been so open and having received excellent support in the past I opted to move back and I’m really pleased I did. They are currently offering a $10 a month Linode 2GB plan which comes with 1 vCPU core, 30GB SSD storage, and 2TB transfer per month. For $20 you’ll get 4GB RAM, 2 vCPU cores and 3TB of network transfer.
The primary components used in this guide are CentOS 7.4 (1708.el7) with PHP 7, MariaDB 5.5.x, WordPress 4.8.x, and Apache 2.4.x. I am already planning to update the eBook with Nftables, the successor to IPtables.