[lug] web site advice needed

[Jed S. Baer]

On Sun, 1 Sep 2013 20:34:54 -0600
Davide Del Vento wrote:

> As one who had done wordpress (and then drupal) having plenty of
> experience with Linux but no experience with a server (at the time),
> I'd argue with the "pretty painless". I'd call it "feasible, with a
> large, but reasonable amount of time and effort, and with a sense of
> urgency (can't delay updates: some MUST be done asap, or you'll get
> hacked -- guaranteed)".
> Don't expect your website to have high availability, since it will be
> down more often than you'd like. Don't expect it not to crash should
> you be slashdotted.

My experience hasn't mirrored yours. I suppose "painless" is a relative
term. My blog never got Slashdotted, nor did I ever get an Instalanche,
or an Unclelanche, or a Tamalanche. Lots of people's sites can't bear up
under such, regardless of the blogging software in use, simply because
they're limited by the amount of server bang they're paying for in a
shared hosting environment.

As far as high availability, see this Wikipedia page, and note the sites
running Wordpress.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog_software

My experience is that availability, and responsiveness, are more a
function of how the hosting company configures their servers. I regularly
visit several Wordpress blogs, and notice no issues with uptime, or
response time, except for one hosted at DreamHost. And in fact, I had
trouble with DreamHost when I was hosted there. I had the same problem at
Midphase too -- initially, things were great, then they made some server
changes, and my blog became a crapshoot (both companies).

I think that shared hosting is a major culprit here, because the proper
steps to take (at least, last I looked into it) to maintain proper
privilege domain separation are a bane to webserver performance. Robert
won't have this problem, since it seems he's self hosting this. He might
have other problems with availability, depending on how much traffic he
gets.

> Should I do this now, I'd either use wordpress.com or blogger (the
> latter can show your own URL), or even better use a static site
> generator (but of course you can't do a forum in that way).

I'd be looking very hard at a VM. Not sure which company, but I wouldn't
have it on a home machine. Of course, last I looked, VMs cost more than
shared hosting. An Amazon cloud server would be tempting.