A New ${HOME}

Up until last week, this website was run on a generic shared hosting account. For the most part, this worked well. At times, it could be slow. I went through all kinds of trouble to tune WordPress as much as I could to make it respond faster. Unfortunately, a lot of the slowness was in the shared MySQL server that they provided. I had them move me between servers a few times, but it never fully resolved the issues.

Despite the slowness problems, there were other things I was missing by using a shared hosting provider. For one, I was very limited in the amount of tweaking I could do. This is partly because of the ban on background processes, but also because I didn’t have administrative access. This meant I couldn’t try different web servers, PHP modules, change MySQL cache configurations, and all that good stuff. You know, all that stuff that normal people don’t care about as long as stuff works.

Well, I’ve now made the jump to a virtual server hosted by Linode! Linode provides a virtual server in the cloud running Linux. They leverage the Xen hypervisor to do this, and you can run pretty much any Linux distribution you want.

So far, my Linode server has these specs:

• 512MB RAM
• 20GB storage
• 200GB transfer/month
• Debian GNU/Linux 6 (64-bit)

So far, I’ve transferred both my and my wife’s websites to the new server. Even better, I’m experimenting with a different web server other than the standard Apache. This site is currently being served by Lighttpd leveraging PHP via FastCGI. If you are interested in trying out Linode for yourself, I’d appreciate it if you used my referral code: de5e9915427e40f9bae981e58ba9b5ca2c3cee69