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Server Migration – Moved To Linode! And Changed To Nginx/PHP-FPM/APC/W3TC

April 5, 2012 | 1,125 views

Outsmart Malicious Hackers


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.

Linode VPS

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 :)

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5 Responses to Server Migration – Moved To Linode! And Changed To Nginx/PHP-FPM/APC/W3TC

  1. geeknik April 5, 2012 at 6:23 pm #

    Linode is awesome! Been with them for almost a year, zero downtime, no complaints. Good choice! =)

  2. Spoonfed April 6, 2012 at 10:00 am #

    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 April 6, 2012 at 4:40 pm #

      If you have any specific questions let me know, I’ll be happy to answer :)

  3. infodox April 6, 2012 at 12:02 pm #

    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 April 6, 2012 at 4:41 pm #

      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 :)