I'm looking for a bit of advice with Linux and VPS's as I have no
experience with either so far.

I am thinking about getting up a VPS for myself to manage some small
html and cfml sites I've been working on.
I see EasySpace offering some good deals on VPS's (
http://www.easyspace.com/virtual_servers ), especially on Linux.

As someone with no experience with Linux I was hoping for a bit of
advice - there are so many options:
- centOS, Debian and Ubuntu, all in 32 or 64bit .... what should I go
with? They all seem to come with Plesk installed.

As these are only small sites (friends, local sports clubs etc..) I
will probably go Open Source all the way and go for Railo and MySql
with Mura CMS or my own custom stuff.

I know some of you have had some experience with different flavours of
Linux and Railo so please reply (even if off list) if you can.

Been a lot of talk about this on Twitter recently as a few Developers are jumping on this band wagon, including myself.

I've got a virtual server running my blog and a couple of other small sites at moment. I've never used Linux before and my first command prompt was actually typed on the new box that I bought from Slicehost at the start of the year :-)

Don't know about flavours of OS but I went with CentOS as there seemed to be a lot more documentation for it both for setup and CF related stuff.

Slicehost I would highly recommend but John Beynon did a good article on them and Mosso here:
http://john.beynon.org.uk/2009/04/17/mosso-cloudservers-vs-slicehost/

I bought the basic Slicehost package and it works out on average about £15 a month (give and take currency conversion as they're US based). Uptime has been 100% and the system is very fast. They have a really decent set of documentation online which takes you through all the setup, locking down of user accounts and firewall access along with installing mySQL, Apache and something else called PHP - Don't know what that is, I just ignored it though.

In terms of installing Railo there is a healthy amount of blogs out there that cover the setup but they'll probably vary depending on your choice of OS. If you got CentOS give me a shout as I've got a great step by step guide that I was sent from a fellow CFfer in the US.

HTH

Cheers,
James

The Robert Gordon University is the best modern university in the UK (The Times Good University Guide 2009)

The Robert Gordon University, a Scottish charity registered under charity number SC 013781.

I was asking about hosting a few weeks ago. I got distracted by other stuff
though, and haven't got around to trying it yet. I'd be interested to know
how you get on.

I discovered a UK centric forum on web hosting, and a few searches on hosts
you are considering should let you know if it's a good idea or not:
http://www.webhostchat.co.uk/

Personally, I think I'll give http://vps.net a go (from the UK2 group). I
quite like the flexibility of cloud computing. I think there may be some
talks clouds at sotr.
Amazon EC2 is obviously the famous cloud. Mosso is another one, although I'm
avoiding them on principle (their owners rackspace once blacklisted a server
of mine and I hold a grudge :)

I have been using these guys for 3 years now
http://www.viviotech.net/vps.cfm.

Really, really good support (very CF focused) even at the cheapest VPS. They
will install CF for you and anything else it seems. I have been using
BlueDragon JX which currently is an extra $10 a month ($25 for cf8) to the
$20 for the basic VPS.  The VPS is extremely customizable so you can start
with the cheapest and easily add more memory etc as you need it.

Don't worry too much about the os linux it's accesed through a web interface
(CP+) much like HELM if you have ever used it.

I can't recommend them highly enough.

Paul

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Martin" <martinwjo...@aol.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 20, 2009 10:52 PM
To: "Scottish ColdFusion User Group" <scottishcfug@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [SCFUG] linux VPS?