Slicehost Articles

It seems your focus is not on productivity (e.g. build a good website, quickly) but rather working hard, from the basics in order to build a strong foundation for the future. Learning from the "ground up" is no easy task, so I would suggest a divide and conquer strategy rather than trying to attack all the problem at the same time. For that reason I'll split the learning in a few different buckets, that you can choose to attack whenever you feel ready for it. I think the methodology below works best if you have a simple project in mind to work through (But remain stay realistic/minimalistic for now).

1. Front-end layout: html/css

Here, think about the website layout you would like to have. Feel free to wander the web and get inspired by other design you like, and try to recreate them. At this point, you might need to brush up your Photoshop skills (for minor things). Look at css frameworks in terms of what they have to offer, and recreate it. (You can even look at their code to understand better).

I would highly recommend using Firebug at this stage, to inspect page elements and css properties for websites you visit. As far as html is concerned, learn about good practices, and standards (quickly, don't become a fanatic). Use w3c validator at the end and try to make it down to zero errors/warnings.

2. Front-end UX: javascript

While html/css focus on presentation, and creating a layout. Client-side Javascript will give life to it. Here I would suggest doing basic things…

This can also happen with Memcached, Redis, and for that matter SQL databases. If you find it on your servers, you should be very, very alarmed. (Assume that any attacker with arbitrary access to any of these owns the box. [+]) One easy-ish way to make sure you don't inadvertently leave a port open is to use iptables and deny inbound connections to everything but 22, 80, and 443 by default.

This is part of the Slicehost VPS setup guide that PickledOnion wrote back in the day, and it's still one of the first things I do when I get a new box. (Typically right after locking down SSH with a key requirement.)

Edit to add:

http://articles.slicehost.com/2008/4/25/ubuntu-hardy-setup-page-1
http://articles.slicehost.com/assets/2007/9/4/iptables.txt <-- make sure you change the port 30000 on the SSH to whatever you use on your boxes

[+] You might think "Well, that requires the existence of both a vulnerability in the server and a local privilege escalation exploit", but in practice, you can assume that the attacker has access to both of these. They also probably aren't trying to get into your box, specifically -- your box is merely one of the several thousand Redis instances on the Internet that they're firing e.g. a specially corrupted Unicode string to get a buffer overrun on, at which point they will -- in a mostly automated fashion -- run metasploit (or similar ratware) and turn that into a root shell.

I've been running my sites (Django-powered) on Slicehost for about two years and have been very pleased overall.

A few observations:

1. Running Apache with both mod_php and mod_passenger (assuming that would be your deployment method for Rails app) on a 256 meg slice may be tight if your traffic levels pick up. (Based on experience with mod_wsgi, mod_python and mod_php, I haven't explicitly used mod_passenger and am unaware of its memory/interpreter model, but think it is similar to mod_wsgi.) But it will be enough to manage your existing blogs and additional PHP applications as long as the load doesn't explode.

2. You don't need any linux administration chops to get started, but every year or so I've learned enough additional practices that I grab another slice, setup the new slice from scratch, transfer my webapps/sites to the new slice, and power down the old one. There are just a number of small best-practices that--when avoided--add up to a hard to manage setup over time, especially when managing multiple sites within multiple servers. You'll probably want to do the same.

3. Slicehost has great resources, http://articles.slicehost.com/ , which should cover most configuration/setup details.

4. Switching over to my own slice and doing administration myself has been a very valuable experience for me, and I really do recommend it.

First, if you aren't already, get a hosting company that offers IP-failover/shared IPs. Linode, Slicehost (among many) offer this. See: http://articles.slicehost.com/2008/10/28/ip-failover-high-availability-explained

Basically, you have two VPSs (or servers) and if the first goes down, the second jumps in to take its place on the same IP address so that you don't have to change the DNS or anything.

Second, you can turn your TTLs down for your DNS so that when you make changes they happen faster.

Third, you can have an offsite VPS mirror with a different hosting company ready to roll.

That's usually how I deal with the issue of high availability. Have two boxes with one company with a shared-IP setup so that if one goes down, the second just takes over. Then have an off-site mirror with a different company and have my DNS TTLs set low enough that hopefully most people can get access in a couple hours.

The problem is that it all costs money. Rather than one server, you now have three. Costs have tripled to move you from, say, 99.5% reliability to 99.9%. So, you're paying a lot more for a very marginal improvement and the question that you have to ask is whether that tiny marginal improvement warrants paying triple. I think it's worth it - servers always seem to go down when I'm least available. So, that's my 2 cents.

I signed up with Slicehost a few months ago. It was my first experience with VPS hosting and Unix.

As a beginner, Slicehost was really great. The control panel is really straight forward and easy to use, their support is quick and helpful, and their how-to articles are really great for beginners.

To quickly compare the how-to's in a similar category:
http://articles.slicehost.com/ubuntu-hardy
vs
http://library.linode.com/lamp-guides/

So they both have articles for the absolute beginners, but it still seems like Linode slightly favors the more intermediate to advanced users in their how-to's. Purely subjective, but Slicehost's seem a bit easier to read / follow.

That being said, this article was incredibly interesting. Now that I have a bit more experience with VPS's and Unix, I am very tempted to head over to Linode.

I am still developing my web app on Slicehost but I have not seen any performance problems since I have very little traffic. I am now considering setting up the production server over at Linode when I'm ready to go live.

Thanks for the great article.

I tend to use a slicehost slice to do my own outbound mail (I use Google Apps for all inbound).

Assuming you have a slice first you'll need to set up your DNS entry pointing to the slice and a reverse DNS entry in the slicehost manager. See these resources for more information:

http://articles.slicehost.com/2008/9/2/mail-server-slice-setup
http://articles.slicehost.com/2007/10/24/creating-a-reverse-dns-record.

Next set up an SPF record for your domain to legitimize your new mail server:

http://articles.slicehost.com/2008/8/8/email-setting-a-sender-policy-framework-spf-record

Finally you'll want to install the mail server software and configure it. I have a blog post that shows the standard config needed to configure the mail server and set up DKIM and DomainKeys to help your mail look legitimate:

http://blog.nimbu.net/setting-up-a-postifx-outbound-mail-server-wit

Check out the links at the bottom of the article for more information about DKIM and DomainKeys.