Starting out with a VPS

Moving web hosts is a royal pain in the bum. But, if I'm to learn once and for all how to do all this sysadmin stuff, clearly I have to take the plunge rather than rely on a hand-holding web hosting company to do it for me.

I've been looking at moving to a VPS (virtual private server) rather than using oversold shared hosts as I have done in the past. Shared hosts are cheap and make things easy for to manage (especially for beginners) but are invariably erratic in terms of performance. Owning a VPS requires much more know-how of how a server works but gives you power and flexibility in return. One would love their own server to do with as they wish of course, but this means handing over considerably more of one's hard earned dough, something not really practical for little personal websites like this.

I have set my mind on going with a VPS provider called Slicehost for sometime now but, literally minutes before I was going to sign up with them, I came across and opted for a competitor called Linode instead. I haven't looked back, their service has been absolutely awesome so far.

It is a little daunting logging in for the first time and being faced with nothing but a blinking cursor but I managed to install everything I wanted fairly quickly and here you are, looking at the fruits of my labour.

So why move? Well, I'll almost certainly never fully leave Dreamhost who I've used up to now. Despite way too much downtime, way too little apology for that downtime ("Sorry your websites were down for a day, here's a picture of a cute cat to make up for it") and the times (note: plural) their support team have fobbed me off with "it's a connection issue at your end" even after you've clearly and absolutely proven otherwise, they still lead the field in the cheap shared hosting trade. If you are starting out and want a cheap web host, you could pick far, far worse.