Installing WordPress site on KVM: Webinoly on TinyKVM

I had tried using Webinoly a while back. I had it to be a rather nifty tool for automating the installation and management of websites. Particularly for WordPress installations or static HTML sites. But the question arises, when we have Gridpane subscription, why opt for Webinoly at all?

The answer lies in the VPS I was testing out: TinyKVM. This is an offering from Ramhost, and boasts of a KVM with a 256 MB RAM. The specifications (disk size and RAM) are way below the recommended amount by Gridpane. Or probably even Runcloud or Server Avatar. Given the humble specs, I thought a command line tool such as Webinoly was a better fit. (Btw, processor was fine, as you may see in the results from nench test below)

I had run this test in July 2019 when I had signed up for the subscription. At the time of writing this post, Linux Distributions Supported by Webinoly are Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04. Therefore, I reinstalled Ubuntu 18.04 on the server, and then installed Webinoly on it. I have created and tested multiple sites using Debian10, even though it is not officially suppoorted by Webinoly.

Installing Webinoly on your VPS to create a WordPress site

The command for installing Webinoly is pretty straightforward:

wget -qO weby qrok.es/wy && sudo bash weby 3


The above command installs the following:
-PHP
-Nginx
-MySQL
-SSL Certificate (via LetsEncrypt)
-FastCGI cache and Redis cache for WordPress sites

You can find the details about the installation on their website.

Creating a WordPress site using Webinoly

Once the installation is complete, I simply gave the command

> sudo site da.aaaa.net -wp -cache=on -ssl=on

Optional commands you can give:

sudo webinoly -conf-value_max-mb-uploads=200
Configuration successfully updated!
[email protected]:~$ sudo webinoly -conf-value_nginx-ppa=mainline
Configuration successfully updated!
[email protected]:~$ sudo webinoly -timezone=Asia/Kolkata
Timezone: Asia/Kolkata


The question is, can one install WordPress on a VPS with 256 MB RAM? Will the machine run at all? The answer is below. Look at the RAM usage after a fresh install.

Memory check
>free -m
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 229 69 88 20 71 16
Swap: 329 97 231

Disk space check
df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 104M 0 104M 0% /dev
tmpfs 58M 584K 57M 1% /run
/dev/sda1 6.9G 2.6G 4.0G 40% /
tmpfs 115M 0 115M 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
tmpfs 115M 0 115M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 23M 0 23M 0% /run/user/1000

The real test of course will be when a fully loaded WordPress site will be tested. More on that later.

Note

TinyKVM has a rather dated interface, but don’t let that cloud your perception of the service- it is simply awesome.

Setting up a new VPS on TinyKVM

Important!

Webinoly opens up the following ports: You may want to block the SMTP port if you are not planning to send emails. As I am testing the VPS out further, I installed UFW and blocked ports 25 and 487 from the below list.

Ports Configuration
22/TCP (Inbound/Outbound)
25/TCP (Outbound)
80/TCP (Inbound/Outbound)
443/TCP (Inbound/Outbound)
587/TCP (Outbound) *Optional for SMTP
11371/TCP (Outbound)
22222/TCP (Inbound)

Update December 27, 2020

I have written a comprehensive post on Ways to Install WordPress on a Budget. Many of the sites were created using Webinoly. You can read that post here.