Myers DS is now running on a VPS on "Slicehost":http://slicehost.com/. I've been debating this move for awhile, and finally took the jump this past weekend. I chose the basic 256mb slice, and am really happy with it so far. I'm running Ubuntu 6.06 and have been using apt-get a fair amount, despite my penchant for compiling things from source. I'll go over my motivations for leaving shared hosting here, and give a more detailed account of my setup process in a later post.
h2. Leaving Textdrive
I'd been with Textdrive for about two years, and had never really experienced many problems on Davie. The server actually got better with time as far as uptime goes. Since my sites were fairly low traffic I didn't get hit by the samurai process killer too often, though I know that was a problem for people running anything from Typo to RMagick processing. Textdrive is a better than average hosting company, growing pains and all, but I'm really happy with the freedom and reliability being on a VPS gives me.
h2. Moving to Slicehost
Even though with a VPS you're responsible for setting up your own server from scratch I found the whole process remarkably more simple and organized than Textdrive. Being able to do everything from the command line was much more enjoyable than having to stumble about in webmin and usermin. While I realize being your own server admin can be a bit daunting at the start, there are so many good tutorials out there it's hard to get completely lost. Slicehost's wiki is at a good point right now where there's enough content to get people pointed in the right direction.
After all was said and done the whole setup process wasn't that complicated. Once you get the basic rails stack setup there isn't much to it.
I really appreciate how simple Slicehost keeps their account management page. With Textdrive I had to keep 5-6 urls bookmarked for everything, with Slicehost it's one url, one page, three tabs.
The next thing I immediately noticed was how fast everything ran. While installing packages it was nice to see that Slicehost hasn't oversold their bandwidth at all. After getting MyersDS up and running on Apache / Mongrel I noticed a nice speed increase as well. Gone too are the issues with running a Lighttpd / FastCGI stack (such as processing dying for no reason).
I'll follow up in a few weeks with more detailed account of my Slicehost experience after I've had a change to get things up and running like Trac and Subversion.
h2. Outsourcing Email to Google
The other big change I made was making the decision not to install Postfix and instead sign up with "Google Apps for your Domain":http://google.com/a/. The process ended up being fairly easy and took 15-20 minutes to get everything switched over. Moving from SquirrelMail to Gmail for a web interface is wonderful. Not having to worry about maintaining a mail server and a spam filter is the biggest benefits I get from it.
h2. Movin' On Up
If you've been wanting to have full control over your hosting service I'd highly recommend a VPS. It gives you full control over how you want to deploy your Rails apps and allows you experiment with a variety of deployment stacks. I personally think the experience you gain is well worth the effort, knowing your way around a Unix box is just a good skill to have.
2007-02-28T03:19:14+00:00
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<p>Myers DS is now running on a <span class="caps">VPS</span> on <a href="http://slicehost.com/">Slicehost</a>. I’ve been debating this move for awhile, and finally took the jump this past weekend. I chose the basic 256mb slice, and am really happy with it so far. I’m running Ubuntu 6.06 and have been using apt-get a fair amount, despite my penchant for compiling things from source. I’ll go over my motivations for leaving shared hosting here, and give a more detailed account of my setup process in a later post.</p>
<h2>Leaving Textdrive</h2>
<p>I’d been with Textdrive for about two years, and had never really experienced many problems on Davie. The server actually got better with time as far as uptime goes. Since my sites were fairly low traffic I didn’t get hit by the samurai process killer too often, though I know that was a problem for people running anything from Typo to RMagick processing. Textdrive is a better than average hosting company, growing pains and all, but I’m really happy with the freedom and reliability being on a <span class="caps">VPS</span> gives me.</p>
<h2>Moving to Slicehost</h2>
<p>Even though with a <span class="caps">VPS</span> you’re responsible for setting up your own server from scratch I found the whole process remarkably more simple and organized than Textdrive. Being able to do everything from the command line was much more enjoyable than having to stumble about in webmin and usermin. While I realize being your own server admin can be a bit daunting at the start, there are so many good tutorials out there it’s hard to get completely lost. Slicehost’s wiki is at a good point right now where there’s enough content to get people pointed in the right direction.</p>
<p>After all was said and done the whole setup process wasn’t that complicated. Once you get the basic rails stack setup there isn’t much to it.</p>
<p>I really appreciate how simple Slicehost keeps their account management page. With Textdrive I had to keep 5-6 urls bookmarked for everything, with Slicehost it’s one url, one page, three tabs.</p>
<p>The next thing I immediately noticed was how fast everything ran. While installing packages it was nice to see that Slicehost hasn’t oversold their bandwidth at all. After getting MyersDS up and running on Apache / Mongrel I noticed a nice speed increase as well. Gone too are the issues with running a Lighttpd / FastCGI stack (such as processing dying for no reason).</p>
<p>I’ll follow up in a few weeks with more detailed account of my Slicehost experience after I’ve had a change to get things up and running like Trac and Subversion.</p>
<h2>Outsourcing Email to Google</h2>
<p>The other big change I made was making the decision not to install Postfix and instead sign up with <a href="http://google.com/a/">Google Apps for your Domain</a>. The process ended up being fairly easy and took 15-20 minutes to get everything switched over. Moving from SquirrelMail to Gmail for a web interface is wonderful. Not having to worry about maintaining a mail server and a spam filter is the biggest benefits I get from it.</p>
<h2>Movin’ On Up</h2>
<p>If you’ve been wanting to have full control over your hosting service I’d highly recommend a <span class="caps">VPS</span>. It gives you full control over how you want to deploy your Rails apps and allows you experiment with a variety of deployment stacks. I personally think the experience you gain is well worth the effort, knowing your way around a Unix box is just a good skill to have.</p>
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Broadcasting from Slicehost
notebook/2007/02/28/broadcasting_from_slicehost