What is the Learning Curve for installing Pantheon at Linode for an absolute beginner?

Pantheon doesn't have to run on a VPS, but is designed to take advantage of the low-barrier of entry.

If you want to test Pantheon (I think you'll like it) I would suggest waiting until mid-November. By then I expect we will post very simple instructions on how to install Pantheon 1.2 on a VPS. The instrutions will be much simplified over the ones for 1.1 Beta (http://groups.drupal.org/node/70268).

Justin did a great job with the Linode stackscript, but unfortunately we've made many changes since then. I hope, as soon as we release 1.2, that we can release another stackscript.

Best of all, Pantheon 1.2 will come with drupal site imports scripts to make importing your site in Pantheon very simple!

Hope this helps,

Greg

...on rackspace cloud for lucid on ubuntu...

went perfect. so amazing. i cannot speak highly enough of the pressflow crews work! wow!

and I am no beginner, but it's pretty much all copy and paste.

I run Mercury 1.1b on Lucid at Linode. Greg provides great instructions that will get you going, but it's not for the faint-of-heart IMO. It's tricky with multiple websites in different directories, dealing with modules that conflict with Varnish, have to tweak config files, and want bcfg and hudson to play nice with you. I was a beginner when I did it and I think the experience has made me an intermediate.

I recommend doing the manual installation as opposed to the Stackscript. You'll see how all the pieces fit together and get a deeper understanding of the system, which will help you in the long-run, when problems arise, etc.. IMO, at this stage, Mercury is not for beginners. That's not a bad thing. It's a complicated system.

We´ve run mercury 1.1 in a production amazon server successfully - with some modifications, like running percona mysql instead of stock mysql, since july 2010 and serving around 20,000 unique visitors a day without any issues - setting up was not hard, but it is not for a linux beginner. 1.2 adds more complexity, specially with hudson and we are having trouble with even the pantheon beta stack.

my advise to antinsa, better to stick with 1.1 and use with linode or amazon with the step-by-step instructions provided above by greg - sorry guys, my shift keys are not working - nothing spilt in my keyboard either - one of those things - instead of the linode script. when pantheon comes out of beta, you might want to check it out and see whether the cost covers your need or not.

questions are to be asked!

and now a question from me to antinsa - is there a particular reason why you need a high performance drupal site - none of the setups you have mentioned will really work unless you match it up with a high performance server structure - the main bottleneck being the data pipes. to match the performance levels offered by something like the mercury stack, you need to be hosted either by amazon or rackspace, even linode does not come near that.

on the other hand, if you want a simple solution that you can host yourself, try http://acquia.com/ - you try either http://acquia.com/products-services/acquia-drupal or drupal gardens - both are free for the moment.

if you want to pay and get a good product, try www.buzzr.com and tell ed i sent you there....

hi antinsa,

wasnt running down linode. it all depends on what you need, the number of unique users you expect, how complex your site it. pantheon - mercury set up using an amazon large server for percona mysql plus two other amazon small servers as mercury web heads can server upto 2000 unique visitors per minute without breaking into any sweat with cpu utilization under 20%. try doing the same without mercury in the same setup with the same drupal configuration - about 60 heavy modules with a lot of customisation - it crawls. run in it a linode, even with mercury - too many dropped connections and it crashes with wsod. your experience will vary.

I've used the mercury stackscript to build my linode, when choosing the 'Mercury' option on the install page, it would install fine but eventually my site would be over-run by this error:

linode mercury Status: 500 Response: Internal Server Error

So I rebuilt the linode – again with the mercury stackscript – then selected the 'pressflow' option on the drupal install page. All went well, my site is running fine. So now I'm trying to build a second site on the same linode but when I run the install script it says:

Your MySQL Server is too old. Drupal requires at least MySQL 4.1.1.

This is the same linode running a fully functioning site and under status it lists MySQL as 5.1.4 as expected...any thoughts as to why this second site thinks mysql is old?