Monthly Archive for March, 2008
I’ve had a slice at SliceHost for longer than I care to admit by now1, I just hadn’t quite gotten around to ever testing and configuring it the way I wanted to.
Well, I finally got around to wiping out whatever I’d been playing with there before and dumping on their stock Debian 4.0 image. After running through their tutorials on setting up Apache2 and PHP, I was good to go.
The base system with my webserver and database running read at about 25 MB of used RAM. Not bad for a fully functional, if barebones, webserver. I’d been worried that, coming from a fully dedicated box with 1 GB of RAM, I would run into a memory bottleneck, but fortunately that didn’t seem it would be a problem.
The next important step was to do some testing. I played around with MySQL, running some basic queries, just to see if it was noticeably laggy after a casual poking. Again, everything looked fine.
The next, and really final, step was to dump a copy of my blog on the slice and see how it ran. After some complaining about the default max_upload_size value in PHP, I got a copy of my database imported using phpMyAdmin and a quick scp -r later and I had an exact copy of my blog setup and ready to go.
All-in-all, it looks like performance is at the very least on-par with the other hosting I’ve used in the past. The performance over DreamHost, where my blog has lived for several months while I really decided where to host it, represents about a 10% improvement3.
I’m still not ready to make the DNS switch, but at least I’ve realized I’m being too paranoid about the memory limits. In the end, the only other reason to stay with my expensive dedicated server is the convenience of Plesk, which scratches my lazy itch perfectly.
If I can get a few scripts hobbled together (in one language or another) to help automate things like vhost and database creation, I may be able to do away with Plesk entirely.
One final problem, and one I’m looking for opinions on, is what to do about email. I’m not planning on dumping DreamHost any time soon4, but I would like to move my email along with my blog if possible.
So who do you use for email? Any problems? Only condition is that they have to offer IMAP…
For some reason I got off on a “Research Australia” kick tonight. I’ve always found it interesting that most of Australia’s inhabitants live in cities on the eastern coast, so I’m mainly focusing my research on the cities of the central and western areas of Australia.
Alice Springs, almost exactly in the center of the continent, sprung up mainly for that reason: it’s in the center of the continent. A telegraph repeater station was originally established there, and later it connected some railways. They’ve got a joint US / Australian military base which monitors satellites, and they’re famous for their “Camel Cup” - racing camels can’t be beat.
Kalgoorlie-Boulder (originally separate cities), were founded mainly by mining folk - especially gold mining. They’re famous for gold… Big surprise. They’ve also been a notorious “wild west” city (Aussie version), and apparently had several popular pubs and brothels. Gold, hookers, and booze… great combination.
And after that, there are lots of boring British colonies. Several were, apparently, just to spite the French, who were rumored to be seeking to colonize the area. Lousy French…
Just discovered that Twitter has “scheduled” a database upgrade for, well, right now. I can’t tweet what I’m doing, but maybe it’ll at least help Twitter stop sucking so much.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 Screenshots
I threw together some screenshots and comments on Flickr while I was quickly giving IE 8 a run through tonight, if anyone’s interested.
IE 8 Beta 1 gallery