dotdeb

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.