From SliceHost to VPSLink

I have migrated from SliceHost, i.e. the RackspaceCloud, to VPSLink for hosting this blog. See my previous VPSLink review here.

SliceHost has served me very well for the last 3 years. In fact at one stage I had > 450 days of uptime, before one of my Python script crashed the slice by using up too much memory. Performance has been great. Absolutely tops in stability. Highly recommended if you are looking for the “Rackspace of Xen VPS host” (which it literally is).

I am however switching to VPSLink for this site for a few reasons (together with about 10 other sites I run). Because,

• It costs me less. From heavy discount & referral system, I am getting a Xen Link4 for ~$251/12 months ($29.36/month x 12 – 10% coupon code discount – $66 referral bonus), which has 512MB RAM, 20GB disk space & 500GB/month data transfer. It’s actually free to me because of past referral credit.
• Sydney to Seattle is around 20ms less than Sydney to St. Louis
• VPSLink has 32bit templates, which saves memory for my LAMP stack.
• Accessing to all 8 cores of an Xeon E5420 rocks (not that I need it).
• Did I say it’s free?

So due to simple economics I made the change to migrate my sites from SliceHost to VPSLink. Thanks for the service!

From Drupal to WordPress

Another big change that I have made is switching from Drupal to WordPress as the blogging platform.

Man I love Drupal. It is flexible and very customisable. It is a developer’s dream CMS because of its flexibility. It is powering my main hobby site at the moment (which takes way too much of my time) serving over 4 million page views a month.

However what I am doing here is just blogging. I am not running a community, nor trying to organise some structured content. I am just posting things here a few times a month, and the flexibility of Drupal has actually became a curse. Drupal 7 is almost out, but I cannot even upgrade to Drupal 6 without heavily tweaks on my modules.

So I gave up. Might as well run WordPress and keep things simple.

I ended up spending a day developing a converter to migrate all my old posts + comments from Drupal to WordPress and retain all the permalinks. So far so good.

Other Updates

A few other updates around the place.

• Updated serverstats to 0.2. Ended up rewriting the tokenizer to get rid of dependency on libpcre so it uses even less memory.
• Updated phpmonitor.py as Linode cleaned up their pastebin thus removed my code.

I think you also have a good point that we need to put pressure on the hosts and Fantastico to take responsibility for the blogs that they set up and stay current with releases.

Then I received DreamHost‘s latest newsletter (January 2008), and in section 2 they introduced their new one-click install “easy mode”:

As dumbed-down as we already made our one-click installs, it seems, like politics, there’s always sufficient demand to make it even dumber.

Which is why we now have “easy mode” for our one-click installs, currently available only for WordPress and currently “BETA”:

http://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=goodies.installer

When you do “easy mode”, you’ll be using a fully-hosted version of WordPress as opposed to getting files installed into your own web space.

This fully-hosted version WILL use your own MySQL database though, which you’ll have full control of. Although you can still pick from over 50 themes and enable some plugins we have installed, you won’t be able to customize the themes or install extra plugins.

However, you also won’t have to worry about managing your installation at all.. we’ll automatically handle all upgrades and it’s now on US to make sure your WordPress blog is always working and fast and correctly configured (so long as you don’t go mucking directly in your database)!

(In fact, “easy” WordPress one-clicks are ALREADY upgraded to 2.3.3!)

You still get the installation at any sub-domain of yours you’d like and of course there are no ads or anything of THAT ilk.

Also, “easy mode” is cool because ALL you do is pick a sub-domain and in less than 17 seconds you’re ready to blog!

Wow! What DreamHost has done is pretty much mimicking WordPress.com, an application hosting service that takes care of everything for its users! The service provider is responsible for updating all the software stack to ensure the service is always up to date and secure. Yes it is a locked-down platform and you cannot modify your theme files nor uploading any plugins (although there are already 50 themes installed), but sometimes you do have to trade flexibility for security.

Moreover, the database will be listed under your DreamHost control panel, and you are free to mysqldump and move it elsewhere later, which is something that you cannot do with WordPress.com. You should probably also host the media files (images, videos, etc) on a different sub-domain inside your DreamHost account, to make later migration easier.

With all that excitement, I went up to my DreamHost account to check it out straight away. Under “Goodies” and “One Click Installs”, you can now find this:

Choose a software (only WordPress is available at the moment), choose a sub-domain and hit “Install for me now!” and the software is installed! A few seconds later, I can already browse to that URL, and what presents in front of me is a standard WordPress installation page where you type in your blog’s name and admin’s email address, and your WordPres blog is up and running in no time.

All too easy.

These are the plugins installed:

• Disable WordPress Core Update
• Disable WordPress Plugin Updates
• Extended Comment Options
• reCAPTCHA
• WP-ShortStat

WordPress runs very fast as well. All blogs created are CNAME’ed to wordpress.dreamhost.com, instead of on the server your websites normally are. They probably run PHP in FastCGI which is why you can’t edit theme files inside WordPress (due to different uid).

$ curl -I http://<my blog>
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2008 23:48:45 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.61 (Unix) PHP/4.4.7 mod_ssl/2.0.61 OpenSSL/0.9.7e mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 DAV/2 SVN/1.4.2
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.8
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Well done DreamHost!

Okay. Time for some disappointment. When I first logged into my shining new quick-installed WordPress blog, scrolled all the way to the bottom of the admin page, and this is what I saw…

WordPress 2.3.2?! WTF?

Update: More issues:

• Instead of WordPress-related websites and services, we have DreamHost blog/support/wiki/etc installed by default on the blogroll.
• Can’t write to .htaccess which means no mod_rewrite, which means no clean URL.