If you're reading this, you're reading my blog as hosted on Slicehost. This is the first step of getting my websites and other infrastructure out of the spare bedroom of my home, and onto somewhat more stable hosting.
Slicehost. This is the first step of getting my websites and other infrastructure out of the spare bedroom of my home, and onto somewhat more stable hosting.
">If you're reading this, you're reading my blog as hosted on Slicehost. This is the first step of getting my websites and other infrastructure out of the spare bedroom of my home, and onto somewhat more stable hosting.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with how this went. I signed up for service with Slicehost on Tuesday, and by Friday, we're live on the VPS. Performance is obviously improved somewhat; the old machine, talus, has a single Pentium III 800MHz CPU, 512MB of memory (fully-populated), and a slow internal IDE disk (with some storage NFS-mounted from another, more powerful machine). While that's served me faithfully as a combination email/web/DNS server, that memory restriction was actually proving to be a serious problem (strangely, the processor was more than enough for the job). The new hardware that I'm sharing is a four-way Opteron 2212 clocked at 2GHz, with 256MB currently allocated to my Xen instance. (Yes, that's less memory, and yes, I said that was the chief problem, bear with me.) As you can imagine, CPU performance is dramatically improved; this hardware shrugs off a few things that the old machine strained to do.
There were some technical changes with the move, to accommodate the smaller memory footprint. First, Apache is gone, replaced with Lighttpd. After having used "Lighty" for a few days, I can't imagine going back to Apache at this point unless I desperately needed mod_dav_svn or some other Apache-specific module. No offense meant to Apache users; it's simply too heavyweight for this environment, and frankly, lighttpd seems to do just about everything I commonly use Apache for (and the rewriting implementation in lighttpd is far more sane than mod_rewrite.
With that change, Django and PHP (for Gallery2) are now running as FastCGI processes. I'd already done a similar thing with PHP at a previous employer (although lighttpd handles startup and process management for you, which is handy), and just needed to whip up a quick initscript for the Django instances I'm going to be running (right now, just one). Previously, I was running mod_php5 and mod_python, which worked exceptionally well, but made an already large webserver even larger, and didn't isolate faults at all; an application failure could be enough to cause significant pain to all websites.
I'm still running on Fedora; I briefly considered running Gentoo for this, to squeeze the most out of the small footprint I've allocated, but realized that I have better things to do than maintain my own distribution. ;-)
I'm also not moving email services here, at least not for now. I'll continue to run those at home, and possibly move them over to a more powerful machine I'm working some bugs out of now. My longer-term thinking is that I might actually move @logic.net to Google Apps, rather than bother with the infrastructure myself; my only concern is that I've set up some rather aggressive spam filtering in-house, and would kick myself if the amount of spam I regularly receive increased after moving to Google. So, I might actually add a second Xen instance at Slicehost for that at some point, and build out a Zimbra system for hosting email or something. (At $20/month for a small VPS like mine, and the ability to clone systems from existing ones in minutes, you start realizing how easy/cheap it is to add capacity without having to actually host infrastructure yourself. Yes, I'm starting to drink the kool-aid, especially when looking at this from a small-business point of view.)
I still have my wife's site to move, as well as a few "utility" services (Subversion, in particular; I'll probably move to svnserve for hosting that, rather than bothering with mod_dav_svn), but I figured I'd move this first, to eat my own dogfood before inflicting it on my wife or anyone else. ;-)