OK – finally getting round to a hosted User Mode Linux (UML) account. Have picked a provider and the wheels are in motion…
Why UML vs. dedicated server? First the “economics” generally look better. Also, within a virtual server, I should truly be “god” – can install whatever I want – it’s virtual after all – good news when you’re a control freak. Also (in theory) it’s more stable – it should be possible to move a virtual server from one physical machine to another fairly easily in case of failure (of course the host needs to offer this though).
What’s interesting from the start, compared to your typical shared hosting account, is you’re confronted with more decisions than just “How much disk space / bandwidth is needed?”. You also need to think about how much ram (I’m going to start with 64Mb which should be enough for mucking around but I doubt will be enough for a site doing anthing intensive and taking significant traffic) and other questions like what Linux distro do you want.
Beyond that will be interesting to see if my moderate Linux skills are enough to be able to manage a User Mode Linux account. We shall see…
Distro-wise, will probably end up with Fedora Core but what would you pick (should be able to request other distros)?
Know my way around Suse pretty well, at least to run my own PC but both Suse and Fedora seem to be fairly conservative when it comes to making packages available for recent PHP versions (and I don’t want to compile my own this time) and of couse I need PHP5. Also cant see myself running X over the Internet so no need to think about Gnome / KDE so a more minimal disto might be better suited.
Perhaps Debian which I’ve had a little experience with? Jason also got me interested in Gentoo recently (should be setting up another PC with it at home shortly), which might be another option.
Harry FuecksHarry Fuecks is the Engineering Project Lead at Tamedia and formerly the Head of Engineering at Squirro. He is a data-driven facilitator, leader, coach and specializes in line management, hiring software engineers, analytics, mobile, and marketing. Harry also enjoys writing and you can read his articles on SitePoint and Medium.
