Are you used to use cPanel or Plesk on VPS for your PHP website management? If for some reason you don't want to use them? What can you do? How do you maintain your website? How do you access Emails, use FTP to upload files or use phpMyAdmin to manage your databases? You may need to configure all these services yourself on a VPS without cPanel or Plesk or other similar apps.

But to configure all these services on a Linux server is not an easy job. You may spend many nights but still fail to get satisfactory results. Here I share with you some useful links which can help you to configure a working PHP web server on a CentOS system with FTP, Email, phpMyAdmin and Cron services. For other Linux servers, I cannot guarantee that these links will work, but on CentOS 5, I successfully configured a working web server with these links.

Here I assume that you know how to install Apache, PHP and MySQL on you CentOS server and make them running.

To configure vsftpd which is a FTP service for file uploading and downloading, you can check :
Installing VSFTPD with virtual users on CentOS 6.

To configure Email accounts for your host name or domain name, you can check the : Email with Postfix, Dovecot and MySQL on CentOS 5 If you want to have a web interface to access Emails, you can use this SquirrelMail after you configure the Email service.

To configure phpMyAdmin, please refer to Install and remote access phpMyAdmin on CentOS.

To create Cron jobs, you can refer to Create cron job on CentOS.

Ok, after you successfully complete all these, you may be able to access your website and also do some administrative work such as checking email, maintaining database and managing cron jobs.

Some other help links :

• Upgrade PHP 5.1/5.2 to 5.3 on CentOS
• CentOS 5 Change Hostname
• SquirrelMail Webmail Setup Howto for RHEL/CentOS 5