Servers | featured news

Around April, my VPS provider Linode announced that they’ve just finished a major $45M upgrade to their hardware and network, which means free upgrades for their existing users. The new hardware uses SSD RAID drives and faster CPUs. I hadn’t bothered because Wopular and Movies With Butter have been relatively stable.

I’m working on a new site using Drupal on a LAMP environment. One of the things I want to install is APC - Alternative PHP Cache - for opcode caching. When I did it with Wopular, I’ve noticed the effects immediately. Because the site crashed so often before using APC, I had to have a script to automatically reboot the server, fixed db errors, and reload the site whenever server resources are used up. It works, but sometimes I would end up with a corrupt database and had to spend hours to days fixing it or restoring it from a backup.

The fiasco over the weekend with T-Mobile Sidekick and Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft, struck a cord with me. If you haven't heard, their server that held nearly a million users' contacts, emails, photos, and appointments went kaput.

Looks like I got all (or most) of the kinks worked out. The site's been pretty stable for the last couple of days. Yeah, I know, it's ONLY a couple days. Compared to crashing every couple hours (or completely out), I'll take that as very good news.