Its official, we’ve defected to the Russians.

I really like litespeed, mostly because it has a simple web interface to manage your virtual hosts, environments and all their settings. I’m seriously over a shell console and typing, programmers really need to get a clue about the power of interface design and a mouse…

Anyway, we did an minor upgrade to rails 2+ and some of our apps just wouldn’t start under litespeed anymore, but the mogrels were fine, so we decided to dump litespeed and run with nginx.

Scared of the install, setup, configs and options at first, I decided to make a night of it, I bought a case of redbull and Heineken and sat down ready be confronted with lots of issues to fix and a massive learning curve to get over.

Turns out I was finished in about 15 minutes – on my development environment, and in 10 minutes more my staging and productions servers we’re also up and running on nginx – with clustered mongrels.

So I put the redbulls back in the fridge and cracked open the Heinekens

Anyway, yeah, nginx is surprisingly simple to setup and use, it apparently can get complicated but I didn’t see any of that. Our local dev server was running in about 15 minutes with a 5 mongrel cluster, nginx is using next to nothing and its all running beautify, don’t know why I never used it in the first place… actually I do, because everywhere said it was a bitch to setup and use… litespeed was harder!

My verdict is to use nginx over just about anything else, I’ve used apache, litespeed, lighthttpd, and some others, nginx kicks all of them in every area.

The planet / ev1 servers have had a massive power outage due to some kind of explosion at their main datacenter, some 9,000 servers are down, digitalpoints sql server is probably affected.

http://forums.theplanet.com/index.php?showtopic=90185

Look, the servers are good, the network is good, the pricing is good, its just the support - there isn’t any.

I HAD 4 GridService accounts with them, now I have 1 with them, my average wait time for tech support is about 2 DAYS.

Well I have 2 GS with them still, about to cancel 1 more now since there’s a ticket open right now that’s over 1 DAY old with NO response at all. Typical shit from them.

So yeah, that’s in progress of being canceled. I recommend slicehost.com, engineyard.com and theplanet.com.

So yeah, mediatemple, feel free to go fuck yourself because your lack of a support department has cost me over $2k (client is pissed at me since they can’t respond). Clients eh? Gotta hate them, but can’t always blame them.

Oh also, I just bought a Windows VPS from a company in Australia, there was an issue, I was able to get on to their live support, and talking to a real person - in Australia in about 20 seconds. Problem solved.

On top of my server moves, I’ve also gone through the motions of upgrading legacy apps, as well as this blogs wordress and phpbb3 forum.

I don’t know what version of WP I was running before, but this new version is pretty cool, better design and interface, nice and clean, and I’ve upgraded phpbb from 3RC3 to the latest version, 3.0

This re-iterates what I was talking about in my last post, the more apps and sites you have floating around the more sites and systems you have to mange, update and maintain on a monthly basis.

All of my sites are run on some kind of underlying application, be it 3rd party or custom written, and all of them require upgrades and maintenance to keep them running efficiently, and to make sure they aren’t venerable to attacks or hacks.

Spending this time is fine, as long as there’s a benefit, if you have all these sites out there that don’t have any traffic and you’re spending time upgrading them then you’re only taking time away that’s better spent serving other sites – you could be spending an extra hour a day promoting your more profitable sites while your screwing around with un-required maintenance.

Really look at all the sites your running and have a good think about what’s up there of value to you, and what’s just a waste of time and resources, kill them and maximize the time you spend to make your main sites more profitable.

Having everything organised is important to me, and it should be for almost everyone. There’s nothing worse than having a server die, or system crash and not knowing what’s affected, not having a backup and not knowing what has to be restored.

Aside from a system restore point of view, it’s important in case a server becomes hacked or heavily loaded; it’s good to have your heavily loaded sites on servers that can handle the traffic, or at least have a location for them to move to in a short period of time if one of your sites does become busy.

I’ve spend the first 4hrs of this morning moving sites off 2 of my old dedicated servers and into new virtual server environments. My new virtual servers won’t have hardware failures and won’t need hardware upgrades, additional resources are 1 click scalable and the hardware is spread across multiple servers.

Another part of organisation I like to do with my servers is to remove any sites that are unused, or dead, I like to prune old sites off my servers, rather than letting them linger around for no real reason, I either sell or just delete and let the domain drop.

The fewer sites floating around on my servers the more focus I have on the sites that are actually worth spending time on, rather than having to maintain sites that are a waste of time.

I have a few hundred domains, but actual sites that are operational are around 40. I have designs and systems for close to 100 domains, but I don’t have the time to maintain or market the rest of them, the designs are sitting on our local server for the day when some of the current batch that are operational are shut down or sold off.

I talk about this because my friend just had server die with about 40 sites on it, took him over a week to restore all the sites on a new server, mostly because of bad backups and not knowing what was actually on that server. It was all a bit of a mess, but at least now he’s running on a dedicated virtual server that shouldn’t die anytime soon.