Once again, JMatt.Net is in a new home. Notice anything different? Actually, for the time being, I hope you don’t. Everything should look the same. The differences are in the underlying infrastructure. If I get ambitious, there are some interesting opportunities for enhancement, but for a while, I’ll mainly be playing with things invisible to the casual observer. My primary reasons for moving are probably comprehensible only to fellow geeks.
Dealing with web hosting services has been a continuous source of frustration since JMatt.Net was born in late 2000. (Hard to believe it’s been 3 years; even harder to believe it’s been almost 10 years since I first started running a website on my office desktop Macintosh). Having been spoiled by running my own servers at work, and configuring them the way I wanted, it’s frustrating to deal with the limitations imposed by a “shared server” environment, where a single large server hosts dozens of domains. It’s even more frustrating to deal with the clueless “support” staff who can’t understand why I don’t like their configuration, and don’t care when I complain that they’re not really providing the service they advertise.
I’d just about reached the boiling point with my latest lack-of-service provider, WebhostXL, after a couple of major outages and continued failure to provide service as advertised. Unfortunately, since they were my fourth host in less than 3 years, because the first three had similar problems, I was beginning to realize that’s just the way the web-hosting business is, at least at the economy end of the business. If I was going to stick with the cheap shared-host resellers, I was probably never going to be happy.
At the same time I was facing this grim realization, I was also beginning to be inundated with spam. As I mentioned here earlier, I didn’t want to change my primary email address to escape the spammers, since that would be a major inconvenience for only a temporary escape. And I was not impressed with the spam filtering options provided by most hosting services, typically something like SpamAssasin which scans the content of email trying to detect spam.
The more I thought about these problems, the more I realized that I really needed my own server, with my choice of software, that I could configure the way I wanted, just like the machines in my office. The only problem with that is the cost of a dedicated server in a colocation facility providing reliable Internet access is really prohibitive for a hobby site, and I haven’t won the lottery yet. I was tempted to just point the JMatt.Net domain name to one of my machines at work, which would give me total control and terrific net access for only the price of the DNS service. As far as I could tell, as long as I wasn’t using it for any commercial purpose, it wouldn’t be a violation of our fairly lenient policy for personal use of University computing facilities. But somehow, it really seemed like I might be stretching the limits by hanging a personal domain name on a University machine, and having outside DNS servers pointing into our network. I decided it wasn’t worth the risk of raising eyebrows.
So I started searching around for yet another hosting service, hoping maybe I could find one better than the previous four. That’s not an easy task, since there are hundreds, probably thousands, of businesses, and no easy way of telling which (if any ) are good. As I was wandering through various host rating and comparison sites, and perusing newsgroups and discussion forums, futilely hoping to find a host that provided the features I wanted and was highly recommended by its customers, I stumbled onto a reference to Linode.
A Linode is an interesting concept, a “virtual dedicated server”, similar to the logical partitions that I’m familiar with on larger machines. A single server is shared by multiple customers, but, unlike the shared host world, each customer has his own copy of the Linux operating system, which he is free to configure to his heart’s desire, and can install whatever other software he chooses, instead of being forced to live with the vendor’s choice of email and web server software. Essentially, it’s the flexibility of a dedicated server, at a fraction of the cost (also a fraction of the capacity, but that’s not a problem for a small site). Way cool! The only way it could be better would be if it was running FreeBSD instead of Linux.
I recently saw a quote saying “Linux is for people who hate Windows; FreeBSD is for people who love Unix.” I really consider myself more of a Windows-hater than a Unix-lover, but I still prefer FreeBSD. I think a more accurate statement would be: “A Linux-lover is a Windows-hater who hasn’t seen FreeBSD.” (That’s slightly plagiarized from a recent quote I saw from a Kucinich supporter: “A Dean supporter is a Democrat who hasn’t heard Dennis speak”). Just like I could live with Dean in the White House in spite of my preference for Dennis, I could be happy with a Linode server in spite of my preference for FreeBSD.
But then I had a flash of inspiration. Maybe somebody does provide virtual dedicated servers running FreeBSD (more likely than the possibility that Dennis will win). With a little more searching, I found Just Virtual Dedicated Servers (JVDS). Shortly afterwards, I had my own virtual FreeBSD system, and was happily installing Apache2, Qmail, PHP, MySQL, and all the other niceties a good web/email server needs. After getting all the software and content loaded, and playing with it for a while, I decided it was ready for prime time. So, after the DNS change to route JMatt.Net to my new playground, voilà, here we are! The next step is to raise the spam shields. Stay tuned.