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Linode goes RAM crazy, prompts me to start considering migration.


Everyone knows about my love afair with Linux. Specificly, Gentoo. Unfortunately, it being a source-based distribution means escentially any system maintenance task–like, say, installing a new program or updating an existing one–is potentially going to be a bit of a memory hog. Hence why I started using Linode for a lot of my playing around work–they give me an environment I don’t need to worry about breaking, the tools with which to potentially break it, and a price tag that doesn’t end up breaking my wallet. And, as of yesterday, they’re handing out more memory with which to break things. Now, one of my VPS’s on Linode presently has more memory than my only VPS on DreamHost, for about the same price. Woopsies. You know what that means.

It’s once again time to consider tossing around that age old debate. To slowly move everything away from DH, or not to. That is the eternal question. I’ve been pretty happy with their overall performance for the last 5 years, moving from shared to now VPS hosting during that time–and, yes, branching out to Linode as it’s been needed. They’ve had a few network issues, and I’ve had to prod tech support in the rear end a time or two, but they’ve been decent. In comparison, I’ve almost never actually needed to talk with Linode’s tech support–most server related issues I can fix myself, and most hardware/network related issues they’re usually aware of before I am. Still, when needed, both DreamHost and Linode have been pretty quick with their assistance. Why do I still stick with DH? Simply put, the manually editing of Apache‘s configuration files. I’ve done it before, on a minor skale or two. Much more than that and I fear it may result in irreparable brain damage. Similarly, setting up and maintaining an email system is probably second most likely to give me brain damage–even if I do decide to go with Postfix and have a pretty semi-nifty solution to the general, day to day administering of things like creating new users, etc. I could, presumedly, just let Google Apps handle email, but there’s something to be said about actually being able to control a semi-important system like that myself. And, if I did move entirely self-hosted, I’d probably want that.

So, while I figure out if and/or when I should start this whole migrating to my own server thing, I fully intend to take complete advantage of the extra memory being dumped on me by one of my awesome hosts. Which means those folks I’m currently hosting on one of those servers? Yeah, I’m looking at you. You’re about to get a performance boost. Happy 7th birthday, Linode. Even if it is a day late and a dollar short.

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2 responses to “Linode goes RAM crazy, prompts me to start considering migration.”

  1. My eyes started glazing over at Linux. Some computer geek once came to fix our computer which had crashed because of a virus and she talked me into letting her install Linux so we could avoid all this virus stuff in the future. Biggest mistake I ever made. We lasted about 3 weeks and then I had someone come in and give us our Windows back. Neither I NOR my daughter are geeky enough for Linux, I guess.

    • It’s definitely not for everyone. Although, if it’s installed right in the first place, you *shouldn’t* have seen a whole lot of difference from Windows, really. It still has things like a desktop interface, etc–the majority of the differences are behind the scenes, where folks who generally don’t have a reason to don’t usually go looking.

      Disclosure: I considered tossing Linux on my parents’ machine a couple years ago for the sole purpose of giving it a performance boost–it couldn’t run that any worse than it’s running Windows. If I wasn’t afraid popping in the CD would make the thing catch fire, I might have gone ahead and done it. I wouldn’t have used Gentoo, though–for folks with absolutely no Linux knowledge whatsoever, Ubuntu is a much better option. Do you recall what distribution the person installed?

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