Hello,

I am considering moving some Django based sites to Linode from a shared host. Has anyone implemented a Django based site here? Any advice on RAM - is the 256 plan enough to comfortably run a Django based blog+forum site? Is the IO limiter thing a problem for database driven sites?

Assume the Ubuntu distro is installed as the server version, is that right? Is the option to install the preconfigured LAMP version of ubuntu available in the auto install, or do I need to do the AMP bit separately? Are other distros better for a Django site?

Appreciate responses - thanks in advance

I have 5 Django sites running at Linode, the earliest went live in October 2006. I'm using Gentoo on a Linode 384. There are also several PHP sites on there (Wordpress and Media Wiki), and MySQL.
The busiest site was getting 10 000 unique IP addresses a day for a while, and ran fine.

Unless (or until) your forum is _very_ active, the 256 plan will be plenty. Make sure you cache as much as you can using memcached, and monitor what SQL Django is issuing by putting some logging statements into Django.

The IO limiter is only a problem for me when I update Gentoo, which compiles lots of stuff. In retrospect I would of used a different distro.
I haven't used Ubuntu server, but I think starting from scratch I would try that first. Or Debian or Centos.

I switched from Gentoo to Ubuntu, and like being free of the chronic config file headaches. Any CPU-intensive libraries that are heavily used should be compiled with server-specific switches for performance, such as liblapack.

James

Thanks for the feedback. So a 256 plan should be ok for my sites which are not that heavily visited as yet.

As I read abit more I can see that I will need to learn more about configuring a LAMP server and with python. I see that the unbuntu 7.04 install is only 252 MB and so assume that basically the 'guts' of linux is installed and then all the rest of AMP + pyhton has to be installed - is that right?

Basically, yes. Installation should just be a matter of apt-getting a few things. I usually like to think of minimal Debian-based distros as having functionality turned off rather than missing, because the entire repository is one command away.

Debian for the win. It's basically a bare bones install that run's an OS and not much else which is the way it should be. You should have to install what you want and not remove stuff you dont want.