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My Blog has died, long live the Blog!
Posted: Thu May 15, 2008 3:23 am
by Maugrim_The_Reaper
Yesterday around 7pm (GMT) I got a support email from Dreamhost stating they had renamed files from my blog's underlying Serendipity application to disable it. Besides the obvious swearing over why they didn't also add a replacement index.html to explain that (instead leaving a useless directory listing), they still have not responded to subsequent queries.
Epic feckin' fail.
From what applications are still managing to run, it appears poor Dreamhost is unable to handle the traffic to the blog any longer. Google Analytics is showing an increase of up to 700% in normal weekly traffic (page views). It appears my blog series on writing a blog (no pun intended

) using the Zend Framework is so popular it's outgrown my hosting in a few short weeks. Traffic yesterday was on target for 9 times normal daily page views.
I really don't want to go to a dedicated host, so I was wondering if folk would like to recommend a good responsive VPS provider. Preferably I need one that will allow expansion as easily, simply, and quickly as possible (clicking a few buttons would be so cool, if unlikely

). And hopefully it comes pre-configured with a non-ancient OS running on crappy oversold hardware (the newest Ubuntu would be a huge plus).
Time is not a huge driver here - it's all personal stuff and I won't be fitting a migration into my schedule until late weekend at the earliest.
Re: My Blog has died, long live the Blog!
Posted: Thu May 15, 2008 4:51 am
by Chris Corbyn
How much bandwidth are you using and how many hits are you getting in a day?
Good work by the way!
EDIT | SliceHost seems to fit your requirements by the way. You can upgrade your slice instantly. We run on it. Don't be put off by our issues -- they seem to be phpBB/MySQL related not host related.
Re: My Blog has died, long live the Blog!
Posted: Thu May 15, 2008 6:37 am
by anjanesh
Chris Corbyn wrote:SliceHost seems to fit your requirements by the way. You can upgrade your slice instantly. We run on it. Don't be put off by our issues -- they seem to be phpBB/MySQL related not host related.
Odd, I thought this was on a IIS6 server !
And thanks for the info on slicehost !
Re: My Blog has died, long live the Blog!
Posted: Thu May 15, 2008 8:04 am
by Maugrim_The_Reaper
I was looking at Slicehost yesterday too. Time to pay them another visit...
Re: My Blog has died, long live the Blog!
Posted: Thu May 15, 2008 10:54 am
by Chalks
I've heard pretty much nothing but good about slicehost. If I ever outstrip my current server's abilities, I'll probably switch there.
Re: My Blog has died, long live the Blog!
Posted: Thu May 15, 2008 12:18 pm
by RobertGonzalez
SliceHost FTW! Yes, they are very expandable and extensible. You will love them.
No, the servers do not come preconfigured for anything. Imagine a vanilla install of a server version of a Linux distro. Yep, that is it. I even had to install tar on our slice.
But it is totally worth it. It is a great setup. Full root access. The works. And they are fast, responsive and very knowledgable. In fact, I am setting up a slice right now.
Re: My Blog has died, long live the Blog!
Posted: Thu May 15, 2008 12:47 pm
by Zoxive
I've had slice host for about 6 months now, from a recommendation on here long ago.
I haven't had any problems what so ever with them, they are great!
Re: My Blog has died, long live the Blog!
Posted: Thu May 15, 2008 1:59 pm
by Maugrim_The_Reaper
I'm debating the merits of a 256 vs 512 slice. I'm planning on centralising some more of my private apps and I have a few other projects in progress that will demand a lot. From the looks of it a 256 slice would do well - heck of a lot more than a shared host provides.
I don't mind configuring and installing myself - I use Ubuntu all the time here. On the bright side, the collapse of my current host is at least finally pushing me into doing something. My hosting has been getting restrictive.
Re: My Blog has died, long live the Blog!
Posted: Thu May 15, 2008 3:55 pm
by RobertGonzalez
256MB is usually enough to run just about anything you need. You can always start with the 256MB slice then up it to whatever you want when you want.
Re: My Blog has died, long live the Blog!
Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 9:05 am
by Maugrim_The_Reaper
Recommendations for Slicehost are almost constant it appears

.
I just paid up for a starting 256MB slice of the pie. Slice is up, active, and of course completely unconfigured running on Ubuntu Hardy LTS.

. Such is life outside shared hosting. Don't worry, I have ssh open as we speak securing the place, nailing down loose tiles, and adding some essentials before I work on my LAMP setup.
Kudos to Dreamhost however for a painless domain transfer.
It's a bit funny to think Devnetwork is a close neighbour now

.
Re: My Blog has died, long live the Blog!
Posted: Sun May 18, 2008 10:24 am
by Maugrim_The_Reaper
The blog is back

. Getting the VPS slice up was almost too easy. Man, I really love Ubuntu...
Re: My Blog has died, long live the Blog!
Posted: Sun May 18, 2008 10:36 am
by matthijs
What's the URL?
http://blog.astrumfutura.com/
returns a temporary page
Re: My Blog has died, long live the Blog!
Posted: Sun May 18, 2008 11:40 am
by Maugrim_The_Reaper
You probably visited during a shorter downtime

. Migrating everything across has turned up a few misconfigurations such as Serendipity storing a path value on the database I almost missed.
Re: My Blog has died, long live the Blog!
Posted: Sun May 18, 2008 12:07 pm
by arjan.top
why is it so slow?
2-4s just for the html ...
Re: My Blog has died, long live the Blog!
Posted: Sun May 18, 2008 12:07 pm
by matthijs
Still no site for me Maugrim. tried in several browsers, in case it was my cache. I only get a page: "Blog Offlined By Host ...."