new hosting choice

general = { about, articles, links, projects } meta = { date-posted: 2007-06-10 }

I have dropped my hosting account on dreamhost.

Why?

Dreamhost had their fair share of problems during my tenure as one of their customers. I used their service for something on the order of 463 days (I only know this because the service cancellator tells you! heh). During that time I had to deal with significant downtimes, overloaded servers, fastcgi killing reaper scripts, and then the recent security breach. I finally decided to take my meager business somewhere else--I was on their lowest price plan near the end, after having downgraded my service plan a few months ago.

Now, the security breach was a bad deal, but in IT, these things do happen. I wasn't, however, impressed with how they handled the breach. The reporting of the incedent, and subsequent customer facing information, was poor. After reporting the breach, the breaches were still occurring! They didn't even block the source of the breaches, nor the service that had been exposed (my understanding was that FTP was the security breach path). The fact that I could not disable FTP, which I intrinsically hate anyway, was another point against my staying with DH.

Oh well.

Moving on

I have since signed up for a Slicehost account (a 256 slice). I must say, so far things are going swimmingly. I moved in to my slice, and have been getting comfortable.

So far I have....

Google Apps for jabber.
Google Apps for email.
Slicehost provides a dns interface, so I am using that for DNS right now.
Nginx for my webserver
Postfix for sending mail off the box (Used to send logwatch and rss2email stuff). Send only
Django for site (fcgi with nginx)
Git for SCM

The only downsides so far....

Gitweb doesn't do fastcgi. Nginx doesn't do cgi.

This one is very understandable though. cgi is typically a vulnerability vector for most webservers. Since fastcgi is communicated to another process, which can be chrooted, or even on another box, this is a compromise I can deal with. Still a bit of a hassle, since I liked gitweb.

I looked at a few gitweb alternatives, but haven't decided on one. My hope is that gitweb will do fastcgi sometime in the near future. I don't really have many git repos that are for public consumption right now anyway, so it isn't a big deal for me right now.

Moving forward

I am really liking slicehost so far. It is nice to have my "own server" again. The transfer allocation amount seems small at first, but I wasn't using anything near my limit at dreamhost. I will keep an eye on it, and see how it goes.