How to install ArcGIS Server on my website

[AdrianWelsh]

Hi, I know this is a broad question but I am hoping there is an answer for this.

My company uses Bluehost (Bluehost ) to host our website (which is the service that WordPress uses). I am not the most familiar with this service but from talking to someone at the Esri UC this past year, they coined it as a LAMP stack server (meaning it's Linux-based, Apache, MySQL, and PHP etc.). They suggested that it might not be best to install ArcGIS Server on this type of system for performance reasons.

HOWEVER, I would like to try this as I am running out of good work-around ideas on what to do with our server license and need to use it. So, my question is, how do I install ArcGIS Server on my Bluehost hosting server site?

From what I understand, I have unlimited storage. I can access all of my files through a file manager and can see them through a client like FileZilla or FTP. But, I cannot make this server act as a virtual directory in order for me to install anything. I have the executable file of ArcGIS Server (currently 10.4.1) on my website.

I have seen some talk of PuTTY and SSH services but it is not clear on how to just 'run' this exe file and have it installed on my server. Can anyone give me suggestions on this?

https://community.esri.com/groups/arcgis-for-desktop-installation-support?sr=search&searchId=f32dda6...‌ - wrong group but hoping to ping other areas

[MarkShymanski]

Have you contacted Bluehost?  You may not be able to run the license manager from their servers.

[AdrianWelsh]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the reply. I have contacted them and they were very unhelpful. Since it is a 'third party' thing, they basically would not assist any further. There are ways of installing various things through Bluehost but they seem to be all 'built-in' type of things like WordPress and other website-enhancing-type programs. None of them are through a command line interface, so I can't 'backdoor' the installation of something else.

I may try contacting them again to hopefully get a more helpful person. It's just that I have struck out a few times with them already and am not necessarily happy with them.

Thanks,

Adrian

[AdrianWelsh]

I contacted bluehost. They were very unhelpful. They basically said I have to contact Esri.

After contacting Esri, things are still a little unresolved and it looks like I may not even have the proper license to install ArcGIS Server on my Linux-based server. Either way, I'll keep this thread updated with what happens.

[RandallWilliams]

Do you have any kind of shell access or remote desktop to this provider? If it's just literally a website hosting service, you might be out of luck. If you have shell access and can install executables and the machine you're installing on is on a supported OS, you should be OK.

You can always leverage ArcGIS Cloudbuilder to deploy an ArcGIS Server site on Azure or Amazon EC2.

[AdrianWelsh]

Randall,

I do not have an easy way to access the remote desktop of this server hosting site. I have downloaded and installed PuTTY in order to get SSH (secure shell) access but it is not very clear on how I can install an executable.

My Esri support person said that .exe files cannot be installed on a Linux system and that is what I currently have.

I would love to use an Amazon cloud server but my company does not fully see the value of spending more money on this.

[RandallWilliams]

OK. Which flavor Linux?

If you can get Shell access, then you can use a tool like winscp to copy the Linux install of ArcGIS Server up to the box, then unzip it. Then under a non-root account you can do a command line install through Putty by running ./setup. Assuming all of the pre-requisites are installed (and this is a supported flavor of Linux), it *should* work. Keep in mind that unless the provider will open up port 6443/6080 you'll want to install an application server like Tomcat and install the web adaptor

[AdrianWelsh]

I wish I knew more about Linux and shells, etc.

I am not fully sure how to figure out which Linux flavor I have. Plus since I don't have a physical thing for me to log into, I'm not sure where to check this. Do you know where I might be able to find this out?

Another issue is that I do not have an install file for ArcGIS Server for Linux. I only have the Windows version. I have contacted my Esri rep about this.

[AdrianWelsh · Accepted solution]

After confirming with support services and lots of communication, Bluehost is not compatible with ArcGIS Enterprise. This site lists the operating system requirements:

ArcGIS Server 10.5 system requirements—Installation Guides (10.5) | ArcGIS Enterprise 

and Bluehost sits on a Red Hat Linux version 4.4.7. Enterprise needs version 6 or 7 or higher, unfortunately (for me).