Well its been far to long since I put something on here… mainly due to a lot of other things being worked on in the background.

After coming back and getting out of the routine of being at sea and having a whole house to look after again. It’s been nice to settle down for Christmas and spend some time with family.

But more importantly it has let me do some more work on doing a few changes to this site (that you haven’t seen), after a bit of Google searching i came across lowendbox and was reading not only about cheap deals on servers but also on how much a very small server could run, and after my own previous experiments with a Pentium 233mhz computer with 32mbs of ram I thought it would be interesting to see what I could do in a memory limited environment with this site and all the things I want to swing off it.

The result was the current location of my website, no longer hosted in Melbourne but the USA, on a 128mb RAM Xen VPS from quickweb that I got on special for half price, making it an even better deal 🙂

So after a couple of weeks of tweaking i have got it all setup and running with almost everything i wanted out of the servers with only 100MB of RAM used under load (not much load but what this site produces) after a few changes in the software stack (mainly removing Apache in favor of Nginx) and some configuration changes (particularly MySql) to help lower the memory foot print. to keep it from swapping constantly i have a full fledged web server with php and mysql, mail server and SVN server running so far. next stop the DNS cluster to move away from Cpanel hosting entirely.

now i must say that if you are looking to host a largish site or many sites looking in to a small VPS is defiantly a consideration you should think of, most hosts have images will all the software already installed to host your site (unless you go for something out of the ordinary) and they can handle a surprising ly large amount of traffic easily, and not to mention Google will help you solve most of your hosting problems on there.

My next project will be a small lightweight control panel to help administer this beast 🙂 (hence the SVN server)

So I should be posting some more on here as I get that up and running with how I have been getting it all to work, and small howto’s on getting your own full featured webserver running on a cheap VPS.