Ask HN: Switching from MediaTemple to Slicehost | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Switching from MediaTemple to Slicehost

5 pointspstinnett5 comments

Hi everyone. I did a quick search but didn't come across any topics directly related to this, so I'm looking for some help from the community. I've recently become interested in switching from MediaTemple to Slicehost. Some background: right now my MediaTemple (gs) account hosts about 5 or 6 Wordpress blogs, and a few static sites. I'm starting to get into Rails and my MediaTemple account is old enough to have been grandfathered in to the free 64MB gridcontainer. None of my blogs receive much traffic, and I really just use my hosting for learning, testing, and non-critical projects. After seeing CloudKick, and researching Slicehost some, I'm thinking of switching over to the bottom of the line Slicehost server. I like the idea of installing everything myself and I think it meets with my goals (what better way to learn than to set everything up yourself). So what do you think? I have 0 experience managing a server, installing Apache, etc. I'm comfortable enough in the terminal to follow any tutorials I might need. Does anyone have any advice on switching/migration? Any great articles I should read before I make the change? Will the 256MB Slice be enough to continue to manage my existing blogs?

I've been running my sites (Django-powered) on Slicehost for about two years and have been very pleased overall.

A few observations:

1. Running Apache with both mod_php and mod_passenger (assuming that would be your deployment method for Rails app) on a 256 meg slice may be tight if your traffic levels pick up. (Based on experience with mod_wsgi, mod_python and mod_php, I haven't explicitly used mod_passenger and am unaware of its memory/interpreter model, but think it is similar to mod_wsgi.) But it will be enough to manage your existing blogs and additional PHP applications as long as the load doesn't explode.

2. You don't need any linux administration chops to get started, but every year or so I've learned enough additional practices that I grab another slice, setup the new slice from scratch, transfer my webapps/sites to the new slice, and power down the old one. There are just a number of small best-practices that--when avoided--add up to a hard to manage setup over time, especially when managing multiple sites within multiple servers. You'll probably want to do the same.

3. Slicehost has great resources, http://articles.slicehost.com/ , which should cover most configuration/setup details.

4. Switching over to my own slice and doing administration myself has been a very valuable experience for me, and I really do recommend it.

Thanks! So you migrate to a new slice each year? Good to know I don't need any linux admin prior knowledge, but it sounds like this is just right for me. Hoping to learn a lot from the experience.

Yep. They prorate charges, so firing up an extra slice for a couple of days will only cost a few dollars.

Yea it definitely will. Just follow the tutorials on slicehost's website and you will be fine. Start off with ubuntu 8.04 imo

Excellent. Thanks!

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