Howdy,

I'm getting ready to order a Hybrid server from WiredTree, as it seems to be the best balance of cost and benefit. But I know hosts install a lot of programs, such as PERL, to make there accounts as default compatible as possible... But I will only be hosting a single website programmed in PHP, Smarty and PostgreSQL. While having PERL and other unneeded applications is not a horrible thing, I am looking to get the server as optimised as possible. And by having nothing but what is needed installed, I won't be vulnerable to security issues in the programs I dont need anyway.

So what core applications do I really need, or even something that is just good to have? Setting asside security applications, such as ClamAV, that WiredTree installs as part of their ServerShield service as I will want everything on that list installed.

By the way, WiredTree uses CentOS and cPanel/WHM.

Regards,

Brandon

Perl is common for any Linux system - and considering that you are going to have cPanel/WHM installed it's impossible to have that without perl.

Also please note that in fact the security applications might cause slowness on your server - you need to know exactly what the server will be doing. If it will just host one domain you need to know whether you'll have the email hosted on the same server as the domain or not, and if not then I guess you won't need software like spamassasin to protect you from SPAM since you won't be hosting any email.

Depending on what will be done by your server you'll need to chose what will you want installed there.

Why do I need to have Perl installed for cPanel? Is isn't listed in the requirements (http://www.cpanel.net/products/cpwhm/cpanel11/sys_requirements.htm).


* 266 MHz Processor or better (more processing power is highly recommended)
* 256MB of RAM (1+ GB recommended when hosting many accounts)
* 10GB-2TB disk space (more disk space is necessary to host more domains)
* A fresh install of a distribution listed below

Cpanel scripts are written in perl and perl is needed by cpanel.