Vultr is one of the most popular cloud platforms in 2022. ServerAvatar manages hundreds of WordPress or PHP based sites on hundreds of Vultr cloud instances and demand for Vultr is growing rapidly.

Right now, Vultr has more than 25 locations (data centers) in different countries including India. If your primary audience is from India, You can host your sites in Mumbai as well as Bangalore data center if you are using Vultr.

Personally, I love Vultr for it’s performance. If you are looking for performance while selecting a cloud platform, Vultr is an awesome choice. It also provides many features that you might not find in other cloud platforms.

This guide covers everything you need to know about Vultr. This guide will make it easier for you to host your websites on cloud and make changes in servers as required. We will cover all the important actions you can perform on your Vultr cloud instance in this guide.

We will get started with the most basic, considering you have no experience with cloud platforms. However, If you are an expert, You can jump the topics or only read the topics that you desire. Here are the topics we will cover in this guide.

What is Vultr?

Vultr is a cloud platform just like AWS, GCP and Digitalocean. It simply provides cloud computing services on-demand. Which means, You can create or delete servers in minutes. You can also perform almost all the server level tasks like re-install, restart or upgrade in minutes.

Vultr provides multiple cloud computing services. Some of the services are:

  1. Cloud computing instances (servers)
  2. Managed databases
  3. Object storage instances
  4. many more.

For this guide, we will focus on the first one, Cloud computing instances or servers. Cloud instances are the most fundamental cloud computing product. It comes with all the essential computing resources and OS. You can configure cloud instances anyway you want to host your projects.

So, Let us first understand what exactly is a cloud instance or a server. You can skip the section if you already know.

What is Vultr Cloud Instance or Server?

At fundamentals, all the servers, VPS, dedicated, cloud instances, droplets, bare metals, etc are same. Regardless of the type of the server, Here are the things you will find common in all of them.

  1. Dedicated IPv4 Address
  2. vCPUs or CPUs
  3. Memory or RAM
  4. Storage space (SSD usually)
  5. Specific Bandwidth Limit
  6. GPUs (optional)

With different combinations of these configurations, we can create different types of servers. For example, a server having dedicated vCPU is called a dedicated server. It does not share it’s computing power with neighbours. In case your vCPUs are shared, your server shares or gets a specific amount of CPU time for computing.

With the combination of these 6 configurations, we can create many different types of cloud instances for different types of requirements. Let’s learn more about different types of servers provided by Vultr.

Types of cloud instances in Vultr

As we learned above, different types of instances are just combinations of different types of hardware configurations like CPUs, Memory, Disk, GPUs, etc. There are four major categories containing more sub-categories of servers.

The four major categories are:

  1. Cloud Compute (Shared vCPUs)
  2. Optimised Cloud Compute (Dedicated vCPUs)
  3. Bare Metal Servers
  4. Cloud GPUs

Let’s understand all of them in detail with sub-categories.

Cloud Compute (Shared vCPUs)

These instances share cloud computing power with other similar cloud instances. It means that you cannot always use 100% of the CPU all the time. Hence, these types of instances are used for small sites with variable cloud computing requirements.

Here are the different types of servers in this category.

  1. High Performance: These servers are powered by NVMe SSDs and powerful Intel and AMD CPUs.
  2. High Frequency: These servers have 3GHz+ Intel Xeon CPUs and NVMe SSD.
  3. Regular Performance: These servers are powered by previous generation CPUs and regular SSD.

Note that these servers have shared vCPUs. The hardware is high performance which means faster computing but it is not possible to use all the computing power of all the vCPUs for your own instance.

Optimised Cloud Compute (Dedicated vCPUs)

These instances have dedicated computing power or vCPUs. This type of cloud instances do not share any computing power with other instances in same category or different category. You have rights to use all the computing power you have in your vCPUs.

Usually Optimised cloud compute is used to host important sites or systems that require specific amount of resources like CPUs, RAM, Storage, etc.

Here are the different types of servers with dedicated vCPUs in Vultr.

  1. General Purpose: These servers have balanced resources like CPU, RAM and Storage with dedicated computing power. If your site is specifically not CPU or Memory hungry, you can select a server from this category to host your site.
  2. CPU Optimised: These servers has 1:2 CPU:RAM ratio. For every 2GB RAM, You get 1 dedicated vCPU. CPU optimised servers are good for hosting applications with high CPU demand.
  3. Memory Optimised: These servers has 1:8 CPU:RAM ratio. It means, You get 8GB RAM for every single vCPU you have on your server. Memory optimised servers are good for running queues or memory based caching systems.
  4. Storage Optimised: Storage optimised servers has 1:8 CPU:RAM ratio with very high storage capacity. The smallest instance in this category has 4TB of storage space. You can use these types of instances for hosting large databases.

So, these are all the different categories of cloud instances available in Vultr. Each category and sub-category has multiple servers having different prices with varying configurations.

Bare Metal Servers

Bare metal servers are the actual “servers” you have in your mind, hardware! It is the only category where you get your own hardware to manage with OS. Cloud compute and Optimised cloud computes are virtual machines created from these servers.

Bare metals are obviously expensive and you have the full responsibility of the server. Obviously, you get ALL the computing power hardware contains.

You get to select the server based on the processor, RAM and other resources it has. There are no sub-categories in this category.

Cloud GPUs

Cloud GPUs is a unique category that allows you to deploy instances with GPUs on-demand. You can use these instances to run applications that require GPUs. For example, ML or AI.

In most cases, You will not need GPUs to run your sites. But if need be, You know that you can create instances with GPUs on Vultr.

You can see the pricing of all the different type of cloud instances on Vultr pricing page.

Now let’s see how to create a cloud instance or a server in Vultr.

How to create a server in Vultr

Creating a Vultr Instance is very easy. All the types of servers we discussed above has the same creation process. To create a server now, Log in to your Vultr account or navigate to “Products” section from the left sidebar.

Then hover on the “+” button with blue background and click on Deploy New Server just like the following image.

Step 1: Select server category

Selecting a server category is different from business to business. You can choose it according to the requirements of your site(s). You can select from Optimized Cloud Compute, Cloud Compute, Cloud GPU, or Bare Metal. If you want to know more about these categories in detail, refer the previous topic “Types of cloud instances in Vultr”.

Step 2: Select server type

These are sub-categories. There will be different server types in different categories.

For example, in cloud compute, You will find categories like High performance, High frequency and regular performance. In optimised cloud compute, You will find General purpose, CPU optimised, RAM optimised and storage optimised.

You can select the one that fits your requirements the best.

Step 3: Select Server Location

There are more than 25 locations to choose from. select the location that is near to your audience and to have low latency and better user experience. Vultr has multiple locations in many countries. So, You can also filter locations country-wise.

Selecting a right location for your server is very important. Refer our small guide to learn how to select an optimial location for your server.

Step 4: Select Server OS

Select a server image from multiple provided server images. Select the one you want to deploy. If you want to use any control panel or want to configure the server manually, You can select the OS image only.

From the Marketplace section, You can also select different types of ready-to-use applications. You can also select snapshots available in your account. You can learn more about snapshots in this guide later.

Note: If you want to manage your Vultr server with ServerAvatar, select Ubuntu 18.04 or 20.04 operating system.

Step 5: Select Server Size

You can pick a server from various given server sizes. It depends upon how much vCPU, Memory, and Bandwidth you will require. The minimum size for NVMe Block Storage and HHD block storage is 10 GB and 40 GB, respectively.

Step 6: Auto Backup (optional)

Automatic Backups are recommended. You can quickly recover existing data on a new instance from a backup in case of disaster recovery. The pricing of automatic backups is 20% of the monthly pricing of your server.

Step 7: Additional Features (optional)

It includes enabling IPv6, DDOS Protection, Virtual Private Server, and more. You can enable the features you want. Note that you can also enable these options after your server is created. So, it is not mandatory to select any right now.

Step 8: Add/select SSH Key (optional)

SSH key improves the security of your instance. SSH keys resemble passwords, so it helps you control who can access the server. If you do not have an SSH key or do not want to use it, You can also access your server with root password. The root password of the server is automatically generated by Vultr.

You will be able to access the root password of your server from server dashboard once the server is ready.

Step 9: Enter Server Hostname & Label

Type server Hostname and label so you can identify your server easily from the list of multiple created servers.

Step 10: Now, click on the Deploy Now button given at the bottom of the screen.

You can also select the number of instances you want to create at once. You can select the number of instances in the bottom-right corner of the sticky bar given at the bottom of the screen.

The deployment will start instantly and it will take around 1-2 minutes to fully deploy the server. Once it is ready, You can start hosting your projects on that server.

If you want to manage your new Vultr server with ServerAvatar, Execute the following commands on your server via console to start initial server configuration.

wget https://srvr.so/install
chmod +x install
./install

Server Overview and Information

Just after server is ready, You have full access of the server. You can log in as a root user in your server to manage it.

To access the server overview in Vultr, go to the list of servers and click on the name of the server. It will take you to the server overview section. It would look like the following image.

On this page, You have all the information you need about your server. In the first row, You have information like bandwidth usage, vCPU usage with trend and charges.

Note: The charges are calculated hourly.

After that, In the first column, You have information to “Access” your server. It contains location, public IPv4 Address, public IPv6 Address, Username and Password. The username will always be “root” as root is the Linux user with ALL the privileges by-default.

In the second column, You have server resources information like number of vCPUs on the server, RAM, Storage and Bandwidth. In the third column, You can see OS and label.

Monitor Server Resource Usage

Monitoring your server for How much resources it is using is very important. If your server runs out of resources like RAM or CPU, your site might slow down or your server might crash. It is essential to keep an eye on how much resources your server has used and how much is remaining.

In Vultr, you can monitor the following metrics for your server while it is active.

  1. Bandwidth usage
  2. vCPU usage
  3. Disk operations
  4. Network Monitoring

These 4 metrics can help you understand on-going issues on the server as well as when to upgrade your server to easily handle the traffic spikes without slowing down the site or application.

To access the monitoring data for your Vultr instance, Go to the list of servers and click on the server name. Then, click on the Usage Graphs from the tabs given on the server dashboard just like the following image.

Once you are there, You will find multiple charts/graphs containing monitoring data of your server. Let’s learn each monitoring metric in detail.

Bandwidth Monitoring

Bandwidth monitoring is the first thing you will see after accessing the Usage graphs section along with important bandwidth usage information like total Inbound and outbound bandwidth usage.

After that, you have a chart containing bandwidth usage information for last 30 days. In this chart, you will see two bars for each day showing incoming and outgoing traffic for a specific day. The bandwidth monitoring part in the usage graphs section should look like the following image.

If you are a beginner, Here is the meaning of inbound and outbound bandwidth/traffic.

  1. Inbound: Inbound bandwidth usage includes the data received by the server from the internet or users of the application. Imagine downloading something on the server or lots of users submitting data to the server in some way. If you download 1GB on the server, Your inbound bandwidth usage will be 1GB.
  2. Outbound: Outbound bandwidth usage includes the data sent by the server to the internet. For example, when we open a site for the first time, Our browser will request all the files required to load the site. This is the data sent by the server. If your site’s homepage is 1MB and you are receiving 1000 totally unique hits on your homepage, you will use 1GB of outbound bandwidth.

In Vultr, you get specific amount of bandwidth for free with each server. For 95% of websites, the bandwidth provided is more than enough to function without any overage.

If your site or application is bandwidth intensive and your bandwidth usage exceeds the limit, it will cost you specific amount per GB.

vCPU Usage

vCPU usage is the actual computing power usage of your server. You will find vCPU usage chart under the Server Monitors heading. It calculates the vCPU usage in percentage and displays in an easy-to-understand chart.

The vCPU usage monitor will look like the following image.

It is important to understand how vCPU usage calculated. If you have a server with 1 core only, the chart will show you the exact percentage and you will not be able to exceed 100%.

However, If you have 2 cores on your server, Your upper limit for THIS CHART is 200%. If you have a server with shared vCPUs, you will not be able to use all of it all the times. However, If you have a server with dedicated vCPUs, you will be able to use all the computing power.

Note that 100% vCPU usage in this chart does not mean you have to upgrade right now if you have multiple cores in your server.

If you are a ServerAvatar user, you do not have to calculate the actual CPU usage for multiple cores. ServerAvatar will automatically show you % CPU usage based on number of cores you have on your server.

Disk Operations

Scroll down a bit from vCPU usage and you will find a chart for Disk operations. This chart contains two metrics called read and write. Not only Vultr, but all the cloud platforms will monitor these two metrics to help you understand disk operations.

Let us understand the difference between read and write operations on disk.

  1. Read Operations: A read operation is when you fetch something from the storage disk of your server. For example, when you open a file to see or edit.
  2. Write Operations: A write operation is when you save or update something on the disk. For example, when you save a file after editing or when you create a whole new file on the disk.

The chart will show you number of disk operations happening on the server in specific time period. Each command you execute on your server will have some read and write operations.

This chart is useful to detect if unusual activities are happening on your disk. It will help you detect intrusion or bugs in your application depending on the situation.

Network

Do not confuse this chart with the bandwidth monitoring chart we discussed above. Bandwidth usage is network usage too. However, there is a subtle difference between these two charts.

Bandwidth usage chart shows the bandwidth usage for the whole day. But, the Network chart will show you network usage in bytes per second. The chart contains two metrics and looks like the following image.

Let us understand both the metrics tracked by this chart.

  1. Bps received: This metric shows bytes per second speed at any specific time. Imagine if you are downloading a file with size 1GB on the server and the download completes in 3 minutes. For these 3 minutes, the Bps received by the server will be very high!
  2. Bps sent: This metric shows bytes per second sent by the server at any specific time. Imagine you are transferring a file of 1GB from your server to remote location, the Bps sent will be very high while the file is being transferred.

I hope you understood the difference between bandwidth usage chart and network chart. In short, the only difference is, Bandwidth usage chart will show you total network used in whole day while the Network chart will show you the speed at which server is sending or receiving the data.

Access Server Console in Vultr

You may have to access the console of your server for multiple reasons. Even if you are going to set up a server control panel to manage sites on your server, You might have to access the console to install the control panel.

In any case, there are two ways to access the console for your server. The first method is,

On the list of servers in the Products tab, click on the Three-dot icon in the last row. You‘ll see all quick action options. Click on the View Console button to access the server console. Or, You can also access the dashboard of your specific server by clicking on it in the Products tab and then clicking on the View Console option from the top-right corner of the server dashboard.

If you do not want to access the web based terminal or console, you can also use following apps in your computer to access the console.

  1. Mac or Linux: Terminal
  2. Windows: Putty

Just open the terminal or putty and execute the following command to access your server via SSH.

ssh root@IPv4_ADDRESS

If you have selected an SSH key while creating a server, it will try to authenticate with SSH keys first. You can also access your server using the password provided by Vultr on Server overview section.

Restart or Power-off a Server

Sometimes you have to restart or power off your server. Vultr allows you to quickly restart or power off your server. Let’s first learn how to restart or reboot a Vultr server.

Restart a Vultr Server

There are two ways you can restart a Vultr server. On the list of servers in the Products tab, click on the Three-dot icon in the last row.

You‘ll see all quick action options. Click on the Restart Server icon to restart your Vultr server.
Or, access the server dashboard of your specific server by clicking on it in the Product tab and following the icon marked in the image below.

The restart process will take less than 1 minute. Note that your sites will be down until the restart process is completed. Now, Let’s see how to power off a Vultr server.

Pro Tip: It is recommended to restart your server every now and then. You can restart your server every week too. It is a good practice.

Power off a Vultr Server

Powering off or turning of a server is as easy as restarting it. When you migrate your site from one server to another, You can turn off the old server for a day or two to make sure that the sites are successfully migrated. If the sites are not successfully migrated, they will face downtime when you power off the older server.

Anyways, to power of a server, you can simply click on the Power off button given on the server dashboard just like the following image.

The server will instantly power off. Note that it will still incur charges even if it is powered off. It is because the computing and storage resources are still dedicated to that server. In case if you do not want the server anymore, you can simply delete it.

Scale your server(s)

Scaling an instance in Vultr is a quick and simple process. The whole process completes in a minute or two.

Scaling is another name of upgrade and downgrade. You can scale up (upgrade) your server or scale down (downgrade) your server depending on the resources you need to run your site or application.

Vultr only supports scaling up. It does not allow you to downgrade your server once upgraded. However, If you are a ServerAvatar user, You have a method to downgrade your cloud requirements in Vultr without distrupting your set up.

Let’s first learn how to upgrade or scale up the Vultr instance.

Upgrade Vultr Instance

You may have to upgrade server for multiple reasons.

Step 1: To upgrade a server in vultr, Just go to the Products section or the server list and click on the server to access the server dashboard.

Step 2: From the server overview, click on the Settings section.

Step 3: From the left sidebar of that section, click on the Change Plan option.

Step 3: Select a new plan from the drop down menu.

You can upgrade your server from this panel. Vultr does not allow downgrades. However, there is one way to downgrade that is the next topic.

Step 4: Click on the Upgrade button to quickly upgrade the server.

Note that when you upgrade your server, It may re-start once. If you have application with lots of moving data, It is recommended to put the site or app or API in maintenance.

It takes less than 5 minutes to upgrade.

Note: If you are a ServerAvatar user, You can use the following method to downgrade Vultr or any other cloud instance.

1. Create a new smaller instance of desired size.
2. Connect it with ServerAvatar. (3 commands to install)
3. Use ServerAvatar’s automatic migration feature to migrate your sites to smaller instance.
4. Update the DNS records / Change IP address in A records of your domains.
5. Delete the larger instance.

Manage Server Backups

Automated backups are Highly recommended! You can opt-in for automated server backups while creating a server. You will be charged 20% of the server cost to create and manage backups of your server automatically.

If you want to enable backup, change the backup schedule or restore from any backup at any time, You can access the Backups section from the server dashboard to manage your backups.

In the backups section, you will see 3 sub-sections to manage your backups, schedule and the current status.

  1. Backup History: This section will show you the list of available backups. If you have just enabled automated backups, there will be nothing in that section just like the above given image.
  2. Backup Schedule: Here you can define the schedule to process automated backups for your server. We recommend you to select a time when the traffic is lowest on your site. You can select Frequency, Dat and Time.
  3. Backup Status: From this section, you can enable or disable automated backups for your server.

If backups are available, you can quickly restore them to recover from the disaster. If you do not need regular scheduled backups, you can also create snapshots for your server and then restore them whenever you want.

Manage Server Snapshots

A Snapshot is a point-in-time image of the instance SSD. Technically, Instance Backup and Instance Snapshot are the same.

The only difference is Backups are automatic whereas, taking snapshots is a manual process. To create a snapshot of your server, follow the below given steps.

Step 1: On the Products page, Click on the Snapshot tab mentioned in the following image.

Step 2: Now select a Server from the list of active servers using dropdown, type Label as per your wish and click the Take Snapshot.

The process will start immediately. The time taken for the process to complete depends on the size of your server.

Note that snapshot can be restored in equal or bigger disc only. And, you can also deploy new instances/servers using snapshots of different servers.

You can also Upload Snapshots from a remote machine. The maximum uploaded snapshot size is 150 GB.

Create and Manage Firewalls

Just after you create a server, Do not forget to create and apply firewall to your server. Firewall protects your server from unauthorised access to different ports/services on the server.

If you have no previous experience with managing firewall, let me explain it in brief.

There are 65536 ports on any Linux server. Different services we install on the server runs on different ports. For example, SSH runs on 22, HTTP runs on 80 and HTTPS on 443.

When you configure your server to host WordPress/PHP sites, you might not need a lot of open ports on your server. If the port is open and accessible from the internet, i.e. your browser, anyone in the world can access that port of your server.

To protect your server from unauthorised access on different important ports, you can isolate them using firewall.

Luckily, Vultr provides firewalls for your server for Free. We can manage firewall rules and assign different firewall instances with different servers.

Let’s learn How to do that. First of all, we are going to create a firewall. Then we will assign it to a server.

Create a Firewall in Vultr

Creating a Firewall is very easy in Vultr. Just follow the steps given below to create one now.

Step 1: Log in to your account. Then find and click on Firewalls option in the products section.

Step 2: Click on the Add Firewall Group button on the Firewalls page.

If you already have a firewall group in your Vultr account, Click on the “+” button on the top-right corner of the section to reveal the Add Firewall Group option. Then click on it.

Step 3: Enter the description of the firewall group and create.

Step 4: Add required firewall rules to your firewall instance.

If you are running a website or an API on the server, I recommend you to allow incoming requests on the following ports. All other ports will be disabled by default.

  1. 22 (SSH): Without this rule, you will not be able to access your server via SSH or SFTP.
  2. 80 (HTTP): Without this rule, your site or API will not be accessible via HTTP.
  3. 443 (HTTPS): Without this rule, your site or API will not be accessible via HTTPS.

You can also allow incoming connections on other ports depending on your requirements. However, these three rules are very important.

After creating all the required firewall rules, you can link the firewall instance with your server(s).

Link Firewall with Vultr Instance

When you link a firewall instance with your Vultr server, the firewall rules defined in a firewall instance will apply to your server. You can attach one firewall group or instance with one or more Vultr servers at once.

If you are hosting same type of websites on multiple Vultr instances, you would have to create a firewall group only once. Then you can link that firewall with your new Vultr servers. Let’s learn how to do that.

Step 1: Click on the Firewalls section from the Vultr dashboard.

Step 2: Click on the firewall instance you created in previous topic.

Step 3: Find and click on the Linked Instance option from the left sidebar of the firewall section.

Step 4: Select the server instance from the dropdown.

Step 5: Click on “+” to attach the firewall group to the new instance.

Now, you will see your server in the Linked Instances list. If you do not want to use the firewall with the server anymore, you can simply unlink it from the list of linked instances.

So, this is how you can protect your Vultr server using firewall. Firewall groups are totally free and you can create and attach many different firewall groups with many different instances.

Re-install OS on Vultr Server

Sometimes you have to re-install your server. Imagine you are configuring your server and something goes wrong beyond repair (Yeah, it happens when you are configuring your server by yourself).

Even if it takes more time to repair the server, it is a wise decision to get started from fresh server than repairing the messed up system.

If you are in a similar situation, you can re-install the OS on your server. Here are the steps you have to follow.

Reinstalling the server leads to deleting all files related to the server and resetting the setting that you made. You can reinstall your server in two different ways:

Method 1: On the Products Page, click on the three dot icon to access Server Reinstall option as shown below.

Method 2: Or, you can access the Server Reinstall icon on the server dashboard.

Note that, you lost your entire server data permanently once you start the reinstall process on your server. So, make sure thrice that you are re-installing OS on a correct server.

It will take a minute or two to re-install OS on your server. Once the process is complete, you can start setting up your server again from scratch with fresh OS installation.

Change Operating System on Server

If you have selected a wrong operating system while creating a server, or you simply desire to change the operating system on your server, you can do it from Vultr. Vultr allows you to change the OS of your server once the server is created.

To re-install your server in Vultr, follow these steps:

It’s straightforward to change the OS on your server. Click on the server in which you want to change the operating system. Now navigate to Settings and access the Change OS tab from the setting section’s left sidebar.

You can choose a new operating system from the dropdown list. Note that it will wipe all the data on your server. Installing a new OS on the server can take upto 1-2 minutes.

Delete a Vultr Cloud Instance

If you do not need a server anymore, you can delete a server instantly in Vultr. Note that server delete is not a reversible action. So, make sure you do not need the server or the data on the server before deciding to delete a server.

In case if you might need data on the server later in the future, you can create a snapshot of the server before deleting an instance.

Anyways, If you are sure, you can delete your server by following these steps.

Method 1: On the Product page, click on the three dots corresponding to the server you want to delete, and you can access the Server Destroy option like the following image.

Method 2: On the Server dashboard, you can see the delete option just like the following image.

It will ask you for permission to delete your server. Check the Yes, destroy this server to finalize the delete process. Your server will be deleted in less than a minute. And you will be charged only for the hours you have used that server in a specific month.

Manage Domains and DNS

If you are going to host a website on a Vultr server, you would have to manage DNS of your domain. You can use any DNS provider as long as you are pointing the A record to the correct IP address, i.e. the IP address of your Vultr server.

The best choice to manage DNS would be through Cloudflare. However, If you do not want to use Cloudflare or any other DNS provider, you can use Vultr’s DNS service to manage DNS records for your domains.

Note: DNS management is totally free in Vultr.

To start managing your DNS with Vultr, set the following nameservers in your domain name settings.

  1. ns1.vultr.com
  2. ns2.vultr.com
  3. ns3.vultr.com
  4. ns4.vultr.com

Once you set these nameservers in your domain name, you can start managing your DNS records on Vultr.

Add domain to Vultr DNS

Managing DNS allows you to control how your domain name resolves. It basically transfers your domain names into IP addresses which web browsers use to load web pages. You can transfer your domain to a new web host through DNS management.

You can manage your domains by going to the DNS tab on the Products page.

Here you will see the list of all domains with created date and time. You can add a new domain to DNS management by hovering on the “+” button and then clicking on the Add Domain option.

After that, you will see a simple form just like the following image.

Enter the domain name in the Domain field and select the Vultr instance you want to use for that domain name. Once you have selected both the options, click on the Add button to add new domain to Vultr DNS.

Manage DNS records

To manage DNS records for a specific domain managed with Vultr DNS, go to the DNS tab from the products section. Now you will see a list of domain names managed with Vultr DNS.

Click on the Edit icon corresponding to the domain name you want to manage. Now, you will see a list of DNS records just like the following image.

Once you have the list of DNS records, you can perform the following actions on the records.

  1. Add new DNS Record: To add a new DNS record, enter the DNS record information in the first row and click on the “+” button given in the last column of the first row.
  2. Edit existing DNS Record: If you want to edit an existing record, you can click on the Edit icon corresponding to the record you want to edit. Then update the DNS record according to your requirements and save.
  3. Delete DNS Record: To delete DNS records, select the record(s) you want to delete from the first column and click on the Delete Records to instantly delete selected DNS records.

So, this is how you can manage your domain’s DNS with Vultr. If you decide to manage the DNS of your domains via Vultr, you can also enable DDOS protection for your servers in Vultr.

Finally, Let’s see how to manage websites on Vultr server or instance.

Manage PHP/WordPress Websites on Vultr Instance/Server

If you are still reading, You already know everything you need to know about Vultr servers or instances. You saw we explored almost all the options available in Vultr User Interface. But none of them covers this topic.

It is because Vultr allows you to manage servers, not sites. When you create a server, You will get a server as-is from Vultr. You will not find an option to add a new website. It is because managing websites on the server is not Vultr’s responsibility, it is yours. And it is the same for all the cloud platforms.

So, How do you host your websites on Vultr server without any technical knowledge of Linux? There are a few ways. They are:

  1. Hire a system administrator to host and manage websites on a server. (Expensive)
  2. Create a server with pre-installed application. (No Management capabilities)
  3. Use a remote server management panel (Recommended).

We will understand the pros and cons of all the methods.

1. Hire a System administrator

In this case, Just after creating a server, You will hire a freelancer and ask them to configure your server and host your websites on it. A good system administrator will charge anywhere between $50-$100 for initial configuration and to host websites.

The problems arise when you want to get help, want to host more sites, solve server errors and perform other tasks at server level. It is because first, they might be slow to respond (We can expect a few hours of delay in response for any human being).

The second issue is, The system administrator might charge you every time you get help from them. As a human is working on your server, It is going to be expensive. Another thing is, You will be sharing root password of your server with a person you have never worked before.

If you still want to go with this method, You can check out gigs on Fiverr or any other freelancing websites.

2. Create Server with Pre-installed Application

This is one way to go. Vultr provides pre-installed applications on servers with Marketplace. At the technical level, imagine you have initially configured a server with website on it. Then you take a snapshot of it, and then you create a server every time with that snapshot, You will always get a website installed on the server.

To find this option, Click on the + -> Deploy New Server option from the top-right corner of the Vultr dashboard. In the section where you are asked to select the Server Image, click on the Marketplace Apps. Once you are there, You will see something like the following image.

The problem with this set up is, You can only host 1 application on 1 server. And the server configuration is basic, or say, might not be optimised. Here you face one common problem with the first method. If something goes south and server errors arise, You will have to hire a system administrator to sort this out.

The only difference between first and the second method is, in the second method, You do not pay system administrator to initially configure the server. After that, both methods have the same problem.

It’s 2022, And you do not deserve that. To solve all the configuration, learning curve and support problems, We have the 3rd method. Note that this method was not viable before 6 years.

3. Use a remote server management panel

Brace Yourself!

A remote server management panel costs you 90% less than an initial configuration done by a system administrator. And here are some capabilities that any remote server management panel will provide.

  1. Instant, Automated and Optimised configuration
  2. Host multiple sites on a single server
  3. Easy-to-use Web Application to manage sites on your server
  4. No/Negligible learning curve required
  5. Clone websites, Create Staging Areas, Create Demo Areas
  6. Migrate sites automatically, instantly
  7. File manager to manage files of your sites
  8. Get support for server level errors
  9. Get Managed Hosting Experience with Vultr Integration

In short, You do not have to hire a person to host your sites on a Vultr server. And it is as easy as managing websites on a managed hosting. Here are some screenshots of a ServerAvatar panel, that is, a remote server management panel.

The following is an application management panel. Here you can manage domains for your sites, use Auto Deploy to auto-install applications, manage staging area, files, ssl certificates, PHP settings, backups and a lot of things.

Application Management Panel

The following is a server management panel. It is where you manage and monitor your server. You can manage things like Applications/sites, Databases, Firewall, Server Alerts, migrations, and lot more.

Server Management Panel

You can try it by yourself. It is free for 1 month. To get started, create a fresh Vultr server with Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04, or 22.04 operating system. Then execute the commands given below as a root user to download an inspect script which will check the server configuration and start the installation if the server is supported.

wget https://srvr.so/install
chmod +x install
./install

It will ask you if you want to configure your server with Apache, Nginx or OpenLiteSpeed. You can select according to your requirements and hit enter. After that, It will check if server is ready for the installation.

After the installation starts, It will provide you a link to your server management panel. The full initial configuration will be over in 6-7 minutes and you will be able to manage your servers and sites using a panel displayed in the above given images.

Quick Links:

  1. Get Started with Vultr
  2. Get Started with ServerAvatar