Oh how things have progressed since i’ve been gone. First time round I used VHCS which is a open source PHP server control panel, nice to use but bloated from its days as a closed source solution. Now i’ve come across using Virtualmin and I’m amazed at how easy it actually is. I’ve deicded to use it as i’m now used to the platform as TextDrive use it. I switch on the webmin service when I need to make a change then shut it down when done.

So here’s to another 3 year experiment with DIY hosting.

1. Memory allocation on shared servers

Recently i’ve been dogged with Mephisto spitting feathers after a few page requests, saying it’s hit its memory limit and the MySQL lib can’t run a command. This is a new change that happend on the TxD servers which i’m not impressed about, especially how the process never seems to tick over the acceptable limits for ruby processes.

2. Joyent

Joyent, the Gmail replacement, or so I thought. Over the last few months its suffered from developer time being concentrated on the wrong areas. Want to make a mail alias for your Joyent account? No you cant, but you can make spiffy lists…

If the guys at Joyent actually worked on features that are needed and not what they want to develop then its quite possible that i’d stick with it. Another fantastic example is that you can’t mark mail as read/unread, even simple webmail clients have this feature but it seems to escape Joyent.

3. Mish-mash of solutions

Textdrive shared hosting run via Webmin, Mail via Joyent or Webmin however you want to do it, Billing related changes via another control panel, Storage space via another panel.

I can understand that Textdrive/Strongspace/Joyent are three products that have been thrown together into the all encompassing “Joyent Core” but they should of worked on the integration before they announced it.

4. All or nothing

I like Strongspace, I like the idea, but now i’ve got to have Textdrive hosting and Joyent mail with it as well, all i want is Strongspace, nothing more. integration is a good thing but why an’t we allowed to buy seperate services? I could go for Bingodisk but that doesnt support rsync. After a quick investigation it seems that S3 is my best bet, and probably a bit cheaper.

So, theres a quick run down of my dealbreakers, the issues i’ve been living with for the last few months. I currently pay around £15 for a low powered dedicated server in London which I hardly make use of, due to the traffic I get to my sites it seems like a good candidate. I’ll use Google Apps for Domains for my mail and related stuff, and S3 for backup. Now, the long trawl of migration…