De Valdez

I’ve been with MediaTemple under their shared and acclaimed grid service for almost two years. In the beginning it was great. And even though it was on the high end of pricing it was still reasonable for the support they gave. As a beginner I don’t regret using them as my first hosting company. However, after implementing nearly ten sites that all require their own database the server became increasingly slow. It got to the point where email accounts and entire sites just wouldn’t be served up, and part of the reason was heavy weekend traffic on the grid.

If my websites are down because Ma’ is taking a sunday drive through google town, I’m probably not going to attract too many new clients. So, I decided to jump ship. Considering that I needed private hosting and the ability to heavily modify the server’s configuration I chose to go with one of these new fangled “unmanaged” hosts (do it yourself) http://linode.com. I end up paying less, but getting much more powerful hardware.

Having never taken on these system’s administrative duties that MediaTemple used to charge me a pretty penny for, you might expect it to take a good amount of time to research and execute such tasks. I’m here to tell you, your host is not worth it. They are taking advantage of you. You’re smart enough to do it on your own. In just a few hours I managed to install Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, tighten up security by locking down common attack points, applied for, installed and configured google apps for De Valdez LLC, installed and configured Apache 2, MySQL, PHP, Ruby, migrated 8 full websites and databases, and updated DNS to boot.

Sounds like a lot, but it’s really not. I think if you navigate this site you’ll find it’s quite quick even for minimal design. In coming posts I’ll outline the above steps and explain how to manage your own web server.