If you are reading this post, you are seeing my shiny new Slicehost setup. As of today, I've moved all of toofishes.net to a dedicated Slicehost VM and off of the shared Dreamhost setup it ran on before.

Why'd I do this? Dreamhost is...not exactly dreamy. It had spurts of downtime, it wasn't particularly fast, and there wasn't a whole lot of room to tinker. Instead, I spent more time doing things like writing a build script to have a more recent version of GIT on the server, and attempting to fight with python2.4 and Django. Now that it is completely my server, I only have one person to blame if things break.

So obviously from the outside, it doesn't look like a whole lot has changed. However, it took a bit of time to get everything set up. The system specs of the entry-level Slice are pretty small- 256 MB of ram and 10 GB of disk space, so you have to fairly smart with how you utilize those resources.

The web stack has completely changed. On Dreamhost the site was using Apache and MySQL on a 2.4 Debian Linux variation. I am now using Lighttpd and PostgreSQL with Arch. Python continues to run as a FastCGI process as before, and is by far the biggest memory user on the server. In second place is my currently open bash shell.

If you notice anything horribly wrong, please let me know. There have been a few rough spots (DNS is so much fun) but for the most part things should be a lot smoother and better performing. Most URLs should remain the same, at least on the blog side, but a lot of the code stuff has moved. Take a look at the shiny new cgit interface for browsing my git repositories. You will also have to update any fetch URLs as the path for all of those has moved. Better yet would be to switch to the git daemon that is now running, as it is much more efficient than an HTTP fetch. All clone URLs should be shown in the cgit interface.

I'll try to post a few things I've figured out along the way in future blog entires, as getting Lighttpd and Django to work together took a bit of time. I also need to figure out how to use PostgreSQL, as right now I still know very little about it.