VPS hosting is the future.

After quite some time using Dreamhost’s shared hosting service, I finally moved most of my sites to a Linux VPS. Not that I’m extremely disappointed with Dreamhost, it just so happened that I’ve been hearing good praises on VPS hosting when compared to traditional shared hosting, especially with Slicehost. That, and the itch to play with programatic things that I can make or break all by myself.

It took me some time to finally bite the bullet, I had to be sure I wasn’t entirely clueless with what I’m diving into. It turns out it isn’t really as hard as I thought it would be, at least for now. I’ve got this weblog and Hana’s up and running. The blogger.ph subdomain blogs are also running on the same server now and I’ve only got a few more domains left in DreamHost. I think I’ll be keeping Dreamhost for a while as a contingency, anyway I think I will still be using them for domain registrations.

So let me tell you a few details on this VPS thingie. I’ve got Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04.1 running Nginx serving PHP, with the database predictably MySQL. WordPress is snappier than ever and runs without problems. iPAP also runs fine in this config. Since Nginx is not Apache and uses a different rewrite engine, you’d have to say goodbye to everything you learned on .htaccess rules. Fortunately, nice permalinks for WordPress are still doable with some googling. For email, I installed Postfix for server outgoing mail but have everything managed through Google Apps; a simpler solution that does the job with ease.

Now all I have to do is catch up on my writing.