Sunday, April 20, 2008

So far so good; no, GREAT!

The other day I wrote about a hosting company that blew me away and I wasn't even a client of theirs. Well, I can now say that I'm the proud owner of two 256MB slices from SliceHost:

1. Gentoo running nginx and a soon-to-be-named rails application.
2. CentOS running a LAMP setup for a soon-to-be-name PHP application (actually, several).

First impressions were everything I had hoped they could have been. I'm about 3-4 years removed from any hardcore system administration. And the background I did have was with RedHat and FreeBSD. Thankfully the Linux community has gotten it right with package installers, making the halcyon days of system administration now uber!

Things learned...
I thought I'd run Feisty on the secondary slice...but, funk dat. I had always wanted to run Cent and heard great things about it and I can say, I really wish that I had installed it on my first slice. Gentoo on the other hand is fabulous for the lean and mean setup that I'm a fan of with web and database servers. Keep all the crap out (who really needs vi anyway?) and bring only what you need to survive.

Finally, I really need to emphasize just how deceptively fast a 256Mb slice is when you begin compiling and installing things like mysql, apache, ruby and imagemagick. What seems to have taken forever (even on my MacBook Pro) in the past, now, literally seemed to have taken a fraction of the time. I can't explain why exactly (grid computing for the win?) but quite frankly, I don't care (I really do - and if anyone can explain it via comments, go for it.) it's fast and I'm as happy as I thought I would be using these guys and their incredible service.

The two times I got stuck (on packages that seemed to exist yet weren't installing) a quick reference to the community pages on SliceHosts absolutely wonderful information repository got me back on track in no time.

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