Starting up a VPS on Slicehost

Author's Note: None of the following is intended to portray any of the companies named in an unflattering light. There were good things about all of them, along with the not-so-good. They all have their fans and their detractors. However, you know that phrase we geeks use when talking about our experiences with things technical? YMMV? Well, my mileage varied, considerably. To the point where I changed vehicles.

My first experience with running Rupp Consulting Services, LLC on VPS (Virtual Private Server) was with Rimuhosting. This was after some, shall we say, sub-optimal experiences with, in chronological order, Yahoo!, Textdrive, and Dreamhost. I went to VPS primarily to relieve the pain of memory/resource constraints/contention, and the inevitable shared downtime that comes with running a shared server.

Rimuhosting, I must say, were great about functionality and support. I left them only reluctantly, having decided to farm out my email and my blog to Google, and not seeing the need to pay for my web presence. Well, that lasted about a month, and I've decided to jump back in. I considered going back to Rimu, but something I read on a blog convinced me to give Slicehost a shot. So far I'm glad I did.

For $20/month, I get root access to my very own "slice" with 256MB memory, 10GB storage, and 100GB bandwidth/month. This compares to 96-128MB / 4GB / 30GB bandwidth on Rimu for the same price. You have to move up to Rimu's $40 plan to even get close to these specs (224MB / 4-8GB / 60GB). So space and bandwith are not a problem. However I do expect to bump up against my memory limit once I start doing any serious Rails development, which is my primary reason for getting back in the VPS game.

One of the reasons for this post, in fact, is to document some of the extra work I had to do to get Ruby and Rails going once my slice was up and running. First, I followed the instructions here to lockdown logins and SSH ports and stuff.

This is one of the first chances Slicehost had to shine. You see, I stupidly locked myself out after the last step (installing the iptables firewall). Slicehost provides an Ajax-based console for just such an occasion. Unfortunately, that wasn't working for me (note to self: enable cookies in Safari next time!), so I needed an even more drastic solution: rebuilding my slice. Fortunately, I was only backing out 10 minutes of work, so this was a viable option. Again, Slicehost really shines here by letting you rebuild automatically from an option on their management screen. A few clicks of the mouse and five minutes of waiting and I got to start fresh, this time being more careful with iptables and actually proofreading my changes and stuff. Amazing what that will do.

Then it was on to installing Ruby, et al. The yum package manager is your friend here. I considered downloading and building everything from source, but that takes a lot of time, and I'm actually becoming a fan (thanks to MacPorts on my home machines) of the whole package management concept. So a quick yum install -y ruby got me started.

Apparently, though, Slicehost installs a very slimmed-down version of Fedora, as I discovered when I tried to yum install -y rubygems. I had problems with missing libraries, which I was able to cure with yum install -y ruby-devel. Which exposed some other missing goodies. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Long story short, here's what I ended up having to yum install to be able to build native extensions for gems and do other *nix hackery I'm used to being able to do out of the box:

• wget
• make
• which
• tar
• gzip
• gcc

I've also installed nginx (vice Apache), mongrel, subversion, and mysql - the usual suspects. nginx works as advertised, and one Mongrel instance handles my Mephisto-generated site traffic nicely. Just that, though, is enough to get me close to 200MB, and that's without the Trac instance I plan to install later. So I may be upgrading my plan even sooner than I expected.