So lately I’ve being doing a lot more DevOps stuff than security stuff and I’m pretty much enjoying it (apart from some of the tedious sys-admin stuff).
So with some of the new stuff I’ve learnt along the way, I decided to move Darknet from a rather bloated managed VPS with 2GB of RAM and Cpanel + a bunch of other crap to a very lean 512MB unmanaged VPS instance on Linode. This has no control panel, no DNS server (using Linode DNS now), no mail server (switched over to Google Apps) and a very minimal software setup.
I also shifted from Apache2 to nginx + PHP-FPM which is a lot more memory friendly, and PHP-FPM has very intelligent self-healing and auto-scaling features.
And I’ve managed to get W3 Total Cache working nicely with the site, so basically all pages are served as static HTML, js + css are minified and DB + WP objects are cached in APC.
The most memory I’ve used so far is a little over 100MB, and the most CPU I’ve used is 32% out of an available 400% (4 cores) – pretty good for a reasonably busy site like this.
Anyway if you find the site faster or slower now, let me know – and if you see any weird stuff/errors/missing pages – please let me know (either in a comment here or via the Contact Page).
And yah, if you do want to sign up with Linode, please use the links on this page – if you stay a customer for 3 months I’ll get $20 credit which will go towards the hosting costs of this site :)
geeknik says
Linode is awesome! Been with them for almost a year, zero downtime, no complaints. Good choice! =)
Spoonfed says
Can you detail maybe a bit more on how you set this thing up? This sounds like a dream to be running such a setup.
Darknet says
If you have any specific questions let me know, I’ll be happy to answer :)
infodox says
Wow, never had checked out Linode before but it does look pretty amazing! Cheap too! Will be using your referral link obviously, gotta support other webmasters/security people :)
BTW, as Spoonfed asked – care to explain the config you used? Provide some setup advice?
Darknet says
Mostly just read/researched (stackoverflow, nginx documentation). nginx just installed from stock Ubuntu 10.04 repo, php-fpm from a backport. APC latest version using PECL, w3 total cache using minify to disk, object & db cache with APC and advanced disk page caching.
Just do it, that’s my only advice – you’ll learn a lot along the way :)