david stanek's digressions

Recently this blog was moved from an expensive dedicated server to a more moderately priced VPS. Overall the transition went well. This is a little surprising because I moved from Gentoo Linux to Ubuntu Linux and from Apache to Lighttpd. Both changes were pretty risky for a production server. So far I have not been disappointed with my decision to switch to Ubuntu. Its ease of use and Debian heritage make it a great server choice. All of the software I needed was easy to install and configure. There were no surprises. I won't stray again...at least for a while. Lighttpd is fantastic. I originally chose it because of its reputation for being light on the system resources. In my experience Apache is a bit of a beast. As a bonus Lighty was also easy to configure. Another change I am happy with. My only problem with Lighty to date is that it can't serve Subversion repositories. The work around is to use Apache to serve the repository and proxy it through Lighty. Unfortunately this means I still have Apache running. Switching hosts turned out to be a very easy decision. My previous host sucked and when I took a look at the control panel Linode offered I knew it was time. They make it extremely easy to create OS images and disk partitions. The have an IRC channels (#linode) on freenode and OFTC. There are a few employees lurking there even late into their evening. These guys were helping me out at 11pm and later. So what would my advice be? If you enjoy taking the easy road then you may want to switch to Linode and use Lighty on Ubuntu. As with all advice take it with a grain of salt. I have a habit of trying new stuff.