I don't really know anything about cloud servers or web hosting.

I run a little homework page hosted by GoDaddy. It works OK, but because the webhost is outside of China it is a bit slow, sometimes annoyingly slow.

I found a company here in China, now.cn. I can get:

I believe this comes without any other software installed.

This will cost me 2330 RMB (about US$340) a year.

But it is inside The Great Firewall, which should improve the speed for loading webpages.

My question is:

Can I then install all the things I need to make the system run, to make the webpage work?

Although I am not very good at computing, I managed to make my localhost, my laptop, work like a server. I installed apache2, PHP, MySQL. When I make a webpage, I try it on localhost first, before I upload.

I am used to using cPanel to manage my webpages and database at GoDaddy. cPanel is very easy to use.

Can I install cPanel on this cloud server?

Or it this technically beyond my layman's ability??

I can't say how hard it is for you to install cpanel. Before subscribing to a cloud provider, I'd create a small VM on my home computer and try that.

Your offering seems excessively expensive and hopelessly outdated. Centos 6.5 is probably seven years old.

Why not Alibaba, Tencent etc? You might even get a free trial.

Are you sure you want to? cPanel is subscription software - usually that's paid for by your hosting provider (who will probably get a bulk discount), but if you're installing it yourself, that becomes an additional expense for you.

There's some alternatives listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compar...control_panels

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I’d suggest Webmin. Free, probably in your distro’s repositories, good documentation, and I find it intuitive (but then, I’ve been using it for remote server support for at least 20 years)

That said, whatever can do to continue to learn use of the command line over ssh will serve you well.

If you’re already up/down loading from a “page hosted by GoDaddy” you’re already doing “cloud hosting”. It’s not different if you choose to use a different provider.

As I understand the nature of your work (from other posts) aren’t you already behind “The Great Firewall”? Mayhaps you could self-host...’tho there are more Learning curves to break there...I wouldn’t normally recommend that, but if your ‘net connectivity is reliable, and you can be online “all” the time, it may be an option..

I think the bolded question in the OP is best resolved buy asking the provider. There hast to be some Other software installed, else you wouldn’t be able to access the server at all. Last time I contracted for a Virtual Private Server I had the provider spin up a CentOS 7 install with working shh, after which I logged in andbuilt the system I needed. They’d have been happy to deliver a fully configured LAMP system with whatever I wanted them to include, but I’m not sure what the fee for that would have been. Ask them. BTW, I pay $1800/year for mine: 500 GB HDD, 8 GB RAM. The quoted price doesn’t seem unreasonable IF it solves the speed issue.

Thanks for the replies.

I looked at Aliyun (Alicloud)

I think I can go with that.

They have something called ECS (Elastic Compute Service I think that is.)

My Chinese is not so good, so when I am confronted with a whole page of Chinese, it is a bit confusing.

But, they have a 新手入门 （Beginners Guide) In there I find some familiar commands for Linux:

So maybe I could get it up and running!

At just under 2000 RMB Still seems pricey though. My boss won't pay for it.

Thanks to some help from LQ, I can connect using ssh. I use rsync every week to download the online classwork and homework, works great.