A month has passed since I’ve moved to a Cloud Server from Rackspace and so far I’m pleased with the whole experience.

It did take a bit of tweaking before I got everything working the way I wanted. This mostly consisted of properly configuring PHP FastCGI as it’s a big resource eater. Another help was making sure that lighttpd is adding proper ETag’s and expire headers. On the WordPress side I was able to configure the WP-SuperCache which takes away some page generation overhead as well.

For the time being I’ll let Rackspace provide me a Cloud Server. I don’t generate that much traffic yet to convince myself to move to Linode, which has bigger VPS servers (more RAM, traffic and storage) for better prices.

Wanted to share that Rackspace has an excellent collection of configuration guides for Ubuntu 10.04 server. Aside from Ubuntu they’ve got guides for every other big Linux distribution as well, such as Fedora, Red Hat, Debian and CentOS. I don’t use those distributions myself but thought it would be nice to mention it. Check their List of Articles for a complete list of Linux distributions. Aside from Linux they’ve also covered Windows Server 2003 and 2008.

Yesterday the provider that hosted my blog let someone loose on the MySQL database causing my website to be unavailable. It was that very moment I decided I had enough of shared hosting.

I’ve moved the website to a Rackspace CloudServer, which basically is a VPS of which I have full control. It’s a lot faster than the previous host, although not as fast as I had hoped. But that could very well be the fault of WordPress.

I’ll let it run like this for a month. If costs do rise above $20 a month then I’ll move to a proper VPS from Linode. Why? More ram, more traffic and more space for the same amount of money.

I’m currently running nginx. First time I’m using this so am still having some problems. So don’t expect everything to work 100%.

Update: I’m now using lighttpd instead of nginx, but performance seems worse. The strange bugs got fixed though.

Update 2: Now it is…  curl wasn’t installed

The latest update of rackspacecloudfiles.mod, version 1.06, comes with metadata support for objects. You can now retrieve metadata and set it. Setting metadata can be done when uploading a file or you can change it on existing objects.

htbaapub.mod got updated to version 1.03 today.

This version contains an updated fsm.mod, rest.mod and rackspacecloudfiles.mod. If you use any of these modules I recommend updating.

Download htbaapub.mod 1.03 (contains source code of all modules)