Yale Daily News Online

By: Robert Baskin (Online Director)

So in my last post, I promised I would write up some of the work we planned to do to improve performance when we had a chance to actually implement the proposed changes. Well, we’ve done quite a bit of work in the past week. I’ll talk about some of the changes and leave some for future posts.

First things first: We changed hosts. For the past year or so, we’ve been hosted on a dedicated box at Softlayer. I have nothing but good things to say about Softlayer - fair prices (a little higher than Layeredtech, but competitive), good features, responsive support, etc. etc. But the server we purchased was the first dedicated server any of us had ever managed, and crud had started to accumulate and make things very difficult.

To begin with, we had Softlayer set up our box with CPanel, which is sort f the industry standard when it comes to server management-control panels. The problem was that as we started to become more competent, we began changing things manually, and CPanel couldn’t stay in sync and thus was rendered effectively useless. I also had a sneaking suspicion that some of its “helpful” services that run to keep your server maintained were actually slowing us down. I definitely thought that it was time to move to a new
server, one where we could start fresh.

After reading around (the Web Hosting Talk forums are invaluable), I decided Slicehost would be a good place for us. (We also considered Linode.) As I alluded to in my previous post, getting a VPS offered several benefits over a dedicated server. First, Slicehost takes daily and weekly snapshot backups of our server, meaning we could restore to a working server easily if something every happened. Second, we could upgrade the size of our “slice” if we ever experienced a surge in traffic. I suggested it would take “a matter of minutes,” but as neodude pointed out, it actually takes about 10-15 minutes. Regardless, being able to upgrade our server that easily is a very helpful feature.

Additionally, Slicehost’s tutorials for setting up a LAMP server are excellent. We decided to install Ubuntu Gutsy on our slice, and using the magic of apt-get, we had everything we needed set up in just a couple hours (much of that learning how to do some fairly basic things). Most importantly, the server was fresh and entirely configured by us: We could make changes easily and keep everything organized how we wanted to. It is great.

If you have some Linux competency, you should consider setting up your own server. With package managers these days, you don’t need to worry about compiling, just configuring, and even the defaults are generally suitable, so it’s very easy.

There are other fantastic features of Slicehost. Although not actually run by the company, the members of the Slicehost IRC channel have been extremely helpful. Also, Slicehost provides a SSH console in their Web manager that you can use to log in to the server if SSH stops working for some reason. (Like, for example, forgetting to leave your SSH port open in the iptables.)

We’ve made some other tweaks to make our Web site run faster. (Hint: look at the “Server” header we’re sending back.) The goal is to survive a Drudging or something similar. I will have more information in future posts about some more of what we’re doing.