Whilst the Brightbox Rails hosting stack is very focused, my general purpose hosting has been based on CentOS, a free flavour of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and the WHM/cPanel server management interface; a scatter gun approach I don’t like: it was time to change.

Keep the servers clean.

I find that removing complex GUIs and reverting to command line management results in cleaner servers, with more control over software baggage and file structure.

On top of this I found that most clients have little interest in accessing the server, preferring that I take care of everything. I’ve no intention of entering the reselling business, so exit cPanel, the extra cost, and the hassle.

Standardise to maintain quality.

I’ve standardised my Ruby maintenance scripts and wanted a set of VMWare Fusion based staging virtual machines for deployment testing. To reduce the workload, and the chances of mistakes, using a single operating system seemed logical.

Since I started using Ruby on Rails, I’ve converged on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS as my server operating system of choice: I find that it is a neater implementation of Linux, especially when it comes to Apache configuration.

Competitive pricing.

At around the same time as these thoughts were flowing through my head, Memset changed the way they implement their VPS leading to better specifications and significant reduction in price.

Initially I was sceptical, it looked too good to be true, but I have completed migrating my existing websites and Subversion repo to a VM1000 and it has run well over the last couple of months. I haven’t run any performance tests, but subjectively these websites seem a little more responsive, and all at a quarter of the price!

A good result.

This is great news since I’ve been wanting to supplement my LAMP based work with more significant applications using Ruby and/or Java stacks, and running all that on a single low resource server is not a good idea.

To sum up I’m still happy with Memset…… probably happier, since the price reductions have made it possible to experiment freely without having to use a US based host with an unclear commitment to environmental impact.

I’m not happy with the web hosting package I currently use. I mean, does Fedora Core 2 sound good to you? OK, I know, it depends what I’m trying to do…

I’m trying to develop Java and Ruby on Rails applications, and just getting the thing configured with such an antiquated version of Fedora is an up hill battle! So I’ve decided to make alternative hosting arrangements before trying anything serious.

On the back of a new business enterprise — Google needn’t worry for the moment — I’m going to get a couple of new VPSs.

1. A development server; the RoR and Java machine with the appropriate server stacks.
2. Production hosting of Drupal 5 installations with LAMP for my clients, which are hard enough get faultlessly configured on the current system.

It also seems like a good idea to separate development and production; I’m bound to knock over the development server at some point.

Both these systems are going to be based in the UK. They’re also going to be much more expensive than my current VPS, but I’ve learned that you often get what you pay for and I’m prepared for the expense.

The new host? I’ve asked questions of several and the most responsive and impressive to date is MEMSET and its Miniserver Virtual Machine range.