Posted by beanjammin on October 27, 2009 at 9:35am
I've been tapped by Dale to put together a presentation on hosting for a future meeting. I'm wondering what aspects of hosting people would be interested in? I'd also like to know whether you would prefer a brief discussion over a wider range of hosting related topics, or an in depth discussion on one or two particular topics?
Here are some ideas I've come up with, please don't let them limit your suggestions:
- Shared vs VPS vs Dedicated vs Cloud - How to decide where your site belongs?
- VPS set-up and basic tuning
- Apache and MySQL configuration - it's really not that difficult
- Drupal scaling and performance
- Evaluating hosting providers - what to watch for
- Hosting for ecommerce
- Unix command line (CLI) basics (good for OSX too!)
Based on feedback I'll try to come up with a presentation that will (hopefully) be of interest to the most people.
Thanks,
- Ben
Comments
Evaluating hosting
I recently ended up with all my clients in one space. "All my eggs in one basket" has me slightly worried. The challenge I face is do I look for a more Drupal friendly provider - someone who has ffmpeg and a few other goodies (anybody else tried to get rid of that "You need the PECL Upload Library" request in the status report? Servers tuned to the linkage between MySQL and code.
Or do I look at VPS? I'm not totally scared of Apache and MySQL but I am afraid of security. I have seen the damage that hackers can wreack on a site. (Not mine but I got to help clean up.)
I'm looking forward to seeing what comes up.
Angus Pratt
Poet, Consultant, Web Designer
Check out my latest completed project - 64 Fun Solutions
Evaluating hosting
Hi Angus,
Take a look at http://www.hotdrupal.com/
Cheers,
Robert
A couple more ideas
This would make an awesome presentation. Here's a couple more topics that could be explored:
Looking forward to it.
Francis
My interests
Thanks for following up on this, Ben!
I'm interested in the setup and ongoing management details for someone who doesn't live and breath system administration. Is it a lot of work to follow/execute LAMP updates or straight forward? What would a standard configuration look like. Would also be interested in insights on when to DIY and when to contract someone else. And it goes without saying, always interested gotcha's!
When it breaks in a big way . . .
I'm always concerned about disaster recovery.
What tools do folks use to automate their backups. Frequency. What tools do they use to restore.
Automation of backups, offsite backups, etc.
Disaster recovery
Good idea. Disaster recovery and backup solutions could be a full presentation on their own, but I'll try to cover the basics. What works best will depend on how your site is hosted and how much you trust your hosting provider and their backup process.
Personally, I think if you don't trust what your hosting provider has for a backup solution you probably want a different hosting provider. That said, rsync over ssh to a remote host is a good way to go. If you use the --with-hard-links switch to rsync you can keep multiple point-in-time backups without using too much space on your remote host. How remote the backup host is and what the bandwidth is like between the two hosts will be an issue when it comes to restoring and how long that process will take.