on December 1st, 2009 by adminA milestone in my life of software engineering, today I entered the magical world of Cloud Computing. I own my Virtual Private Server, leaving behind the cumbersome limitations of the usual web-hosting services. Day one impressions are very positive, although it is too early to see a full picture – still in the middle of installing the applications on my server.
My service provider is webkeepers.com. The registration and setup went smoothly, they had a minor glitch in credit card processing, but nothing to be mad about. The initial instructions that they e-mailed were clear and correct. Be warned, you do need to know what you are doing, if you choose webkeepers.com. They do not provide support beyond running your VM.
Still spending my late evenings with the server setup. So far the Apache server is configured, Ruby installed. I tried to go with the standard Ruby distribution, but with Rails if I run 4-5 instances of the application concurrently, then I run out of my VPS memory. Since I was installing Phusion Passenger (mod_rails) for Apache anyways, it was a quick decision to switch to Ruby Enterprise Edition. Truely a life saver when available memory is limited. REE is on version 1.8.7. Can’t wait the day when the major gems all get converted to 1.9.1 and run stable. While I managed to do some basics with 1.9.1 and Rails 2.3.5, there are showstopper bugs – so 1.8.7 will work for the time being.
I set up MySQL, installed Wordpress and tested the blog migration from the old server – it was fairly easy. Don’t forget to set write permissions on the wp-content folder if you get an error message saying that the upload could not be moved to the wp-content folder. I still have my mail server to setup, probably I keep it for last.
The next challenge is that I will need to revisit my Rails application, and make some modifications on the code to make it safe in a multi-instance environment.
As of Sunday evening, finally all components are installed and working. Thanks to my friend Szabolcs, who assisted me on the DNS zone setup. The DNS setup itself was not difficult, the major waste of time occured with us not looking at the right place. We changed the zone on the VPS side, but since the name servers point to PrimeVPS, the correct way is to set it up on their control panel. For a long time I was under the impression that they do a zone forwarding into my VPS, but they don’t.
Had some technical trouble last Friday – but glad to report that the Webkeepers support team responded fast, and corrected the issue. I was attempting to do a complete restore of the VPS image to it’s initial state, got error messages while doing that and it went downhill from there. Overall, still a positive experience, I am glad I made this step.