Hello,

I run an Australian rugby union website, http://www.greenandgoldrugby.com/ . I've been hosting this on Dreamhost for a few years, however we're growing to the point that their frequent outages (3 this week) are starting to hurt, and I think it's also close to capacity on their processor usage.

I've got a wordpress blog with around 3000 pageviews/day and an smf forum (about to switch to vBulletin though) with 6000 pageviews/day.

I'm seriously considering the switch to a Linode360, however this would really be pushing my linux skills, which is also a bonus I guess. I'm comfortable in a console and quite capable of following the excellent guides here, but wouldn't know which distro to start with.

My concerns are being able to test that the site is secure, being sure the site will cope with the load and knowing which components to install on top of mysql and php5.

Are there any wordpress/vBulletin specific guides available?

Thanks,
Andrew.

Hi! I am also a Dreamhost user.

My recommendations from experience are to install 32-bit CentOS (the memory you save by using 32-bit over 64-bit is considerable), Webmin, and VirtualMin.

You should end up with a control panel type hosting system (a little like DreamHost), but with some reliability at last.

You can experiment with setting it up and not worry about breaking it as you can just tear it all down and build a new Linode in a few minutes.

Thanks for the response Johnny,

How did you find the jump from a managed environment into going solo? I like the idea of being able to control my own space, but am concerned of being caught short on a production site.

CentOS sounds great, does it include a cPanel like interface? I have been reading through the ubuntu guides till now, will take a look at CentOS and see how it compares.

From what I've read so far I nginx seems pretty lightweight, however I need mod_rewrite to SEO URL's... so might end up with Apache regardless.

Cheers,
Andrew.

CentOS itself is just a distribution of Linux, so it doesn't have an interface.

From my understanding of it, CentOS is like RedHat (which favours reliability a little more than new features, and costs money as it is supported) and is free.

Webmin is an open-source package that adds a web-based control panel for many of the common functions like Apache web server, databases, scheduled jobs and package installation.

VirtualMin goes on top of WebMin and sets up web page domains, email (although I certainly recommend hosting your email elsewhere instead of using your valuable server resources and time).

If you haven't run your own server before, I would definately stick with Apache. With a bit of caching here and there, 6000 visitors should be fine.

Virtualmin screenshots:
http://www.virtualmin.com/screenshots

Webmin screenshots:
http://www.webmin.com/demo.html

If you have a spare domain name you don't use, I recommend getting a Linode account (you can get a refund if you don't like it), trying to set it up, and see how you go.

It is a far better choice than Dreamhost VPS which I notice went down for many hours last month

Thanks again Johnny for the info, lots of reading for me to do now!

Do I need a spare domain to get it all going, or can I run off an IP until I'm ready to move the site over?

From experience a spare domain would be best.

A subdomain would probably be fine... you could set it up manually in your Dreamhost DNS section, but it is not ideal.

I personally use my Dreamhost account for email and Linode for the rest.

http://library.linode.com/web-applicati ... index.html