Moving Forward

Good news, I’ve moved everything to a LEMP based stack!

Previously this blog, as well as a number of small personal projects had been hosted using the downright terrible shared hosting service provided by HostGator. I’ve never been a fan of HostGator, they treat their customers poorly and I’ve had numerous support incidents while hosting my site with them. It’s been clear for a long time that I needed a change.

With everyone moving to new technology like Node.js and Nginx it only makes sense that I should move to a virtualized server. My next project more than most likely will involve utilizing some of these new technologies, and hosting non web-based services. I took some time and evaluated a lot of the VPS solutions out there currently and the word on the street is that Linode offers some of the best service, features, and reliability out there. Cheaper solutions exist, but for $20 you essentially get a complete self-managed server.

The Scary World of Unmanaged Hosting

The downside of a Linode instance is that the management of your site is suddenly in your own hands, and you are responsible for the security and maintenance of your server. This really isn’t a problem in modern-day systems, Linux is pretty secure out of the box, and servers are designed with a minimal footprint.

Why Linode?

Linode is not the cheapest VPS out there. You can find better deals, but what you won’t be able to find is a better community and collection of technical information. They have done a wonderful job providing ample documentation to get up and running, and cover all the common questions that one has when starting to host their own server in the real world.

The people behind Linode know their technology. Linode is built on top of Xen, the industry leading virtualization technology you’ll find powering many popular cloud services (EC2, Rackspace, etc) with a really nice web-based control panel for managing instances.

Additionally for development you’ll find a number of prebuilt StackScripts. These are really handy for quickly trying out a new technology. Allowing for user-submitted StackScripts makes it easy to try out new technologies if you have a spare node. I didn’t use a StackScript, only because installing the tools by hand generally gives you a pretty good feel for where they are located and how they are configured.

Let’s Get Started!

So let’s get started. I really didn’t do anything novel here, so I’ll be concise:

• Order a Linode – I ordered the $20 a month Linode, it should work for now. I set it up with Ubuntu 11.10 out of the box. It was set up instantly and with a few quick clicks I had a server up and running with SSH access.
• Install the Stack – This wonderful tutorial documents the process really well. I installed nginx, PHP, and mySQL from apt-get, unless you’re planning on doing devel work on these tools I’m not sure what advantages there are to compiling from source.
• Backup and Move WordPress – Surprisingly moving a large application like WordPress is surprisingly simple. I took the easy approach and exported a database copy in the form of an SQL script to recreate the database, and did a file-by-file copy of the WordPress site. I uploaded everything using SFTP (FTP is kind of old school- I wouldn’t recommend it) and quickly was up and running.
• Update the DNS Records – Linode offers a complete DNS solution, and provides nameservers for hosting domains. Surprisingly, by far the most time intensive part of this process was waiting for GoDaddy’s domain configuration page to load. I’m planning on moving my domain away from GoDaddy, and this has added some fuel to the fire.

And the results…

I had always suspected that HostGator had oversold its service to a unacceptable degree, I often experienced phantom delays and timeouts, with their support team being unable to turn up any problems. After switching I’ve noticed that the response time for my site has improved significantly, and the variance has also fallen. This means that visitors will get a much better experience, which makes me happy.

I’ve already started looking at new projects now that I have a nice permanent piece of computation hooked up with a large pipe to the internet at large. I would recommend something like this to any developer who needs more capabilities than shared hosting can provide. While there’s a slight overhead required to manage and update services, I think the flexibility and performance you gain are totally worth the effort.