BlueHost

Transition to LEMP

If you’re reading this, it means you are using the new AFdN server! As part of my foolish reason plunge in to Virtual Private Servers.

I’ve been able to migrate all the files moved over1, setup, and fine tune the new system.

It’s not that I wasn’t happy with BlueHost, just that I had grown out of Bluehost, which makes sense: Bluehost really is targeted and people new to web hosting. I’ve had a web site since I was 11.

I’ve heard rumors that Bluehost has over 500 users on each one of their boxes, upgrading to their Pro Package a couple of years ago put me on a box with “80% less accounts per server”, but it still wasn’t cutting it. I needed more!

The LEMP setup: Linux, Nginx2, MariaDB, PHP-FPM.

From a hardware standpoint, fremont is a NextGen 1GB Linode Virtual Private Server (VPS), powered by dual Intel Sandy Bridge E5-2670 processors each of which “enjoys 20 MB of cache and has 8 cores running at 2.6 Ghz” and is shared with, on average, 39 other Linodes.

Linux

I’ve chosen to run Debian 7 (64 bit); it’s a Linux distribution I trust, has a good security focus, and I’m also very familiar with it.

Setting it up the Linode was easy. I decided against using StackScripts because I wanted to know exactly what was going into my system and I wanted to have the experience in case something goes wrong down the line.

I took a fresh copy of Wheezy (Debian 7) and then used the following guides:

I very seriously considered encrypting the entire server, but decided against because ultimately the hardware was still going to be out of my physical control and thus encrypting the system was not an appropriate solution for the attack vector I was concerned with.

Nginx

I’ve always used Apache to do the actual web serving, but I’ve heard great things about Nginx and I wanted to try it. Since I was already going down the foolish path, I figured that I had nothing to lose with trying a new web server as well.

To make things easier, I installed Nginx from the repo instead of from source and then configured it using the (more or less) standard approach.

It’s really simple to install, I probably over thought it.

rtCamp has a really great tutorial on setting up fastcgi_cache_purge that allows Nginx to cache WordPress data and then purge and rebuild the cached content after you edit a post/page from WordPress dashboard or approve a comment on an article.

MariaDB

The standard tool for web-based SQL databases in my book has always been mySQL. But just like Nginx, I’ve heard some good things about MariaDB and figured why not. The great thing is, MariaDB is essentially a drop-in replacement for mySQL. Installing from the repo was a piece of cake and there really is no practical difference in operation…it just works, but better (in theory).

PHP-FPM

PHP FastCGI Process Manager (FPM) is an alternative to the regular PHP FastCGI implementation. In particular, it includes adaptive process spawning, among other things, and seems to be the defacto PHP implementation method for Nginx. Installing from the repo was a piece of cake and required only minimal configuration.

I originally used the TCP Sockets, but found that UNIX Sockets gave better performance.

Fine-tuning

Getting everything moved over was pretty easy, I did some benchmarking using Google Chrome’s Network DevTool and using Plugin Performance Profiler from GoDaddy3.

Most of the fine tuning was the little things, like better matching the threads to the number of cores I had available. I also enabled IPv6 support, which means that AFdN is IPv6 compliant:

ipv6 ready

Enjoy faster and better access to AFdN!

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  1. at least for AFdN, there are other sites I run that are still in migration ↩

  2. pronounced engine-x, the “e” is invisible ↩

  3. I know, I’m just as shocked as you ↩

Welcome to fremont.fergcorp.com

For whatever foolish reason, I’ve decided to take the plunge in to Virtual Private Servers and sprung for a 1GB Linode.

I’m actually kind of excited by this. It’s sort of like being back in high school and running my own server from my parents house. Except I’m ten years wiser…and married.

Anyway, after some minor toiling about whether I should install nginx from the Debian repository or compile it from source, I ended up going with option C and am trying the dotdeb repo.

This has been predominately driven by my continuous desire to push BlueHost to boundaries of what shared hosting meant. I upgraded to the Pro account last year, but it’s still a bit sluggish and I still consistently find myself having to scrape together horrid workarounds for things I want to do on the server. I probably should have got VPS a year ago, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to take that task on…I’m still not sure.

The server is named Fremont, because it’s located in Fremont, California.

I’m going to move some of the sites I run off of BlueHost to see how fremont (along with nginx, MariaDB, and PHP-FPM) handles everything — and to see if BlueHost gets any snappier.

If all goes well, there’s a good chance I’ll move all the sites to fremont.

For now though, I just have the basic “Hey, it works” page up and running, including an SSL certificate, at https://fremont.fergcorp.com.

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Servers Moved

I’ve been moving around some of the technological assets under my control. I completed a Registrar switch in May. I’ve been working the last month to move servers. I’m still with BlueHost because they are great, I just moved to a box with fewer people on it (i.e. less resources to share). I also get my very own IP address and SSL certificate!

I just completed the switch of AFdN (which was the last asset on the old server) this afternoon. Everything should be okay, but if not, please let me know.

For those interested, here’s what I did (over SSH from the new server):

ssh old_server.com 'cd ~/www/; mysqldump -u username -p mysql_wp > dump.sql;'
rsync -av --exclude 'notthisfolder' -e ssh old_server.com:~/www/ ~/www/.
mysql -u username_new -p mysql_wp < ~/www/dump.sql
rm ~/www/dump.sql

Some resources I used:

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Where Did BURL Go?

On Friday I had a bit of scare. From my Inboxen™:

Attention Andrew:

Your BlueHost.Com account for andrewferguson.net was deactivated. Your data may still be temporarily available even though your web site may not be functioning. If you feel this deactivation is in error, please contact support as soon as possible.

Thank you,

Bluehost Support

A quick check on my site indicated that it had been deactivated.

Fuck, was pretty much the only word that came to mind. I quickly called up BlueHost to see what the problem was.

As it turned out, some spammer had found my little project and was using it to disguise their links. This made it look like I was spamming, even though I was not. Not even ten minutes later, everything was cleared up. Then I went and took down BURL offline.

I may go back and implement a CAPTCHA or include a Terms of Service Agreement. But that’s where BURL is.

[tags]burl[/tags]

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