Rob's Blog

For a while I was finding my website slow. The host I was using, Powweb, often seemed slow at MySQL. Shopping around for new web hosts, I became aware of the concept of a virtual private server. It’s a virtual machine, many of which will be running on a computer in a rack somewhere. Unlike a traditional web host, you have complete control over your very own Linux box, but also complete responsibility for making it work.

After some surfing, I decided that Rackspace would be a fairly risk free way to try it out. They charge by the hour, so you can create a virtual machine, play with it, and destroy it afterwards at next to no cost. I’d heard of Rackspace from Robert Scoble, and they seem like a good company to deal with.

Using Rackspace
So I signed up for my account and had a ten minute wait before Rackspace phoned me up to verify I was a real person for billing purposes. Perhaps they are worried people will use their systems for fraud or spamming. In any case it was quick and the guy on the phone was helpful.

Next I created my server. The web interface makes it easy to create and destroy servers at will. You choose how much memory you want (this affects the price) and the operating system you want to use. I chose Ubuntu because I am familiar with it and 256MB of RAM because it was the cheapest option and it’s easy to upgrade if you find you need it. After a few minutes of building I had an IP address and I could log in.

Initial setup
The first thing to realise is that you are responsible for a server on the internet, so taking care of security is important. I found a handy guide and followed the recipe (or at least the bits of it I liked). It’s also important to keep the operating system up to date, a cron job can do this automatically but it’s probably worth keeping an eye on things to make sure all is going well. Somewhat reassuring is that the whole server can be backed up as a single image which is trivial to restore. Unlike a traditional web host where you have to back up your web files and MySQL database separately, this seems more straightforward.

With Ubuntu, installing the AMP bit of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) is easy with apt-get. Even phpMyAdmin is available as a package and works out of the box. I soon had my web server up and running and my WordPress database transferred across. I spent a few days playing with webgen to update my ageing, hand-crafted HTML static web pages, and was eventually happy with the site.

DNS
The next thing was to point my domain name at my web server. DNS is something I only mess with once every few years, and at first I messed up by pointing the domain name directly at my server. robfisher.net worked but www.robfisher.net didn’t. That all the various DNS caches take *hours* to refresh doesn’t help. Eventually I figured out with a chat session to Rackspace support that I had to point my domain name at Rackspace’s DNS servers, and then configure those using a web control panel to point at my virtual server. This is really flexible as if I wanted to I could have many servers with different subdomains, or point many subdomains at just the one server.

Redirects
Another problem was that I wanted to ditch the www. part of my web address. On Powweb www.robfisher.net and robfisher.net were the same thing, but people had not linked to it consistently and Google results pointed to a mixture. So I learnt about 301 redirects and also used this technique to point to the web pages that had moved around as a result of my playing with webgen.

Memory
So everything was fine, but I noticed with Rackspace’s diagnostics that my server was swapping occasionally. In other words it was running low on memory. Now that’s not necessarily a problem, after all it’s Rackspace’s disk that’s getting worn out and they don’t charge for disk I/O. My website was still much quicker than it had been on Powweb. But I like things to work the way they should work, so I looked around for various ways to optimize memory usage. This is something of a black art but there are plenty of web tutorials. The change that made the most difference for me was tweaking StartServers, MinSpareServers, and MaxSpareServers (that site also taught me about vmstat). By running top and pressing shift and M I could see that each of about 10 Apache processes seemed to use up to 10% of available memory. My site is not so high traffic that this is anywhere near necessary, and reducing the number of processes reduced the memory usage to the point where I was not swapping at all. WordPress pages also loaded noticably faster.

Email
Finally I noticed that I was not receiving notification emails from WordPress. In my /var/log/mail.log file I could see, “Our system has detected an unusual amount of 421-4.7.0 unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our 421-4.7.0 users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been temporarily 421-4.7.0 blocked.” On no! Had I been hacked?

It turns out this is a problem with cloud hosting. There are all kinds of rules to running a mail server properly, and it seems like hard work. All web addresses are on the Spamhaus PBL list by default, which is just a way of saying “I am an end user and not a mail server”. You can get your server removed from PBL, but I worried that if I didn’t maintain my mail server properly I would get on all kinds of blacklists and never get removed from them. Fortunately, it is possible to configure Postfix to send mail via another SMTP server, and it is possible to use Google Mail’s own SMTP server. For the volume of mail my web server will handle (notifications from PHP programs) this is perfect.

The verdict: it’s not for everyone but for now I am happy. I get to learn stuff about running a web server. Rackspace is the cheapest way to get a VPS that I found. The server itself is only $10 a month and because my site uses hardly any bandwidth my bandwidth charges are next to nothing. With Rackspace you pay for exactly what you use.

It’s about twice as expensive as Powweb was, but my server is now lightning fast compared to how it used to be, and I can play around with running whatever software I want on it.

Logging into it via SSH on my Android phone to check for OS updates and memory usage is extremely geeky fun.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 12:30 am and is filed under Geekism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.