Server Move
Well, if you’re reading this (and I really, really hope you are) then the you’re seeing the page from my new server! I decided to take the plunge and purchase the VPSLink-2 scheme, which gave me a bit more room to play around with. In hindsight, that was a very wise choice as 64MB of RAM just isn’t enough for a LAMP stack (as pointed out by Scott Yang in my recent post).
I’m running various services and things to make life easier. Currently it uses about 54MB of RAM idle, although that shoots up a little when loaded. Overall, I’m pretty happy with everything as it currently stands - the speed of the website is much, much better than it used to be with DreamHost and things are going pretty swimmingly.
My Setup
I don’t require very much in terms of functionality from my server, so this is actually reasonably short. For my web-based applications, I stepped away from Apache and went with lighttpd instead. Coupled with FastCGI and PHP, it’s a lot easier to configure than Apache and takes up less resources; highly recommended for anybody with performance in mind.
Since I host a number of domains and e-mail is clearly a big part of that, I decided to set up a full virtual mail server environment using Postfix, dovecot and MySQL, with SMTP authentication. There’s hundreds of guides out there for this, but I highly recommend dovecot for your IMAP and POP3 hosting needs. It has an in-built SASL implementation, which completely neglects the need to mess around with Cyrus-SASL for SMTH authentication.
For my administrative tools, I’m using PostfixAdmin for mail accounts and phpMyAdmin for everything else. Both of these work very well by themselves.
The Verdict
So far, I’m very impressed by the speed of the servers. From reading the forums, there’s quite a lot of people having disk I/O issues but for whatever reason that hasn’t affected me yet. The 128MB memory hard-limit is causing a few issues with the more memory intensive applications (e.g. compilation), but sometime in the near future, I should be able to upgrade to the VPSLink-3 package with double the RAM.
23/1/2006 1:05 am
Yay for lighty! I’ve pretty much got your exact configuration, but without Postfixadmin. I should check that out.
23/11/2006 11:48 pm
lighty’s an amazing piece of software, no doubt about it. I was dreading having Apache in such a low memory configuration, but this seems to have solved pretty much all of my issues so far!
I highly, highly recommend Postfixadmin. It makes managing e-mail a whole load easier, and allows your clients (if you have any) to manage their own addresses without you popping into phpMyAdmin every 10 minutes.