Slicehost Articles

Slicehost also has excellent stuff - http://articles.slicehost.com/

I would highly recommend slicehost.com as a VPS host and they have a great library of tutorials (particularly helpful for linux newbies) http://articles.slicehost.com/. Even if you don't get an account with them, you'll probably find the tutorials very useful.

Although I love Heroku, and it really is a great platform, I find that, for my startup and personal projects, the costs hold me back from doing some things. Say I need to run a simple background job, that would be $36/month - almost 2 linodes. And with the excellent articles on http://articles.slicehost.com, I find that setting up a vps takes no more than a few hours. Plus, it's a lot of fun and a good learning experience! I don't see how Heroku could do it much cheaper though, when you look at the pricing of Amazon EC2 instances which their platform runs on.

When I got my first VPS, I read through the articles at Slicehost: http://articles.slicehost.com/ The walkthroughs cover a variety of distros including Ubuntu, Debian, and CentOS and can be quite useful regardless of where your VPS is hosted. The articles emphasize good security practices as well which can be helpful for a beginner to understand. The other thing to do is dig into the docs for anything specific you plan to work on. I tend to look for tools with good documentation before getting started. I've always been impressed with Apache HTTP Server's documentation (http://httpd.apache.org/) and have learned a lot by referencing it when I've had issues. Whenever you have questions, ask friendly geeks for help. I always do best with real-life assistance, but IRC is a good way to go as well.

Slicehost has an excellent assortment of articles for Ubuntu (as well as plenty of other topics). It looks like they don't have any for Karmic yet though. http://articles.slicehost.com/

I don't have any book recommendations, at least specifically with Debian. I've always been able to get an answer on the web. Now, I usually start with http://www.debian-administration.org to get some better ideas of how I can get some task done. I also find some good tips for Debian and Ubuntu at http://articles.slicehost.com

Slicehost is wonderful ... they aren't a "managed" company but their support is great. They reply to tickets fast and have a support chatroom. They also have some great articles for getting slices prepped for php/rails/django apps on different distros: http://articles.slicehost.com/ I wont name names, but I've had better support from Slicehost than a managed RoR hosting company that costs 5x.

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.

Linode, Slicehost and Digital Ocean all have pretty good libraries for beginners: https://library.linode.com/ http://articles.slicehost.com/ https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles

I really like the Linux/server tutorials SliceHost has: http://articles.slicehost.com/

If you're looking at slicehost, then you must know they have step by step instructions to get you setup at http://articles.slicehost.com/ This should get you pretty far. You can always ask the community for help if you need and worse case turn to http://www.admingeekz.com/ , http://www.geniusweb.com/system_administration , http://www.supportpro.com/administration.php or some other hourly/per case type of sysadmin service.

go through the articles slicehost has written up to get rails and passenger installed and your app deployed. They are fantastic and you'll be very comfortable doing it anywhere else afterwards. http://articles.slicehost.com/rails

I first learned to manage a server using a Slicehost VPS. They have a good collection of tutorials at http://articles.slicehost.com/ A lot of it depends on what you are trying to 'serve' :) EDIT: Make sure you spend some time reading about security issues (iptables and such). It's easy to miss, but certainly as important as any other sys-admin task

I'm with Linode as well but I have to say Slicehost has awesome guides that can really show you everything you need to do to setup your vps. Have a look at the following link for example. [1] [1] http://articles.slicehost.com/2008/4/25/ubuntu-hardy-setup-page-1

Checkout the slicehost documents too if you want a different approach. They are equally good and maybe better. Edit link: http://articles.slicehost.com/

Slicehost has some good articles on configuring linux servers for various webservers/frameworks: http://articles.slicehost.com/

We have a lot of articles at http://articles.slicehost.com which will walk you through a lot of typical server installations. Additionally, even though our service is unmanaged, we're usually in a campfire chat and will answer questions if we're able (and direct you toward the answer if we're not).

Slicehost has a few good articles: http://articles.slicehost.com/ I have used them for setting up my own slice and it worked out really well.

Slicehost has a articles about configuring a server http://articles.slicehost.com/. I use git, Rails and Capistrano. Git is nice because everybody has a copy of the repository and in case the server is down or you are offline you can still work.

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…

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… 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.

http://articles.slicehost.com. A godsend.

You don't have to rent a VPS, you can [use linode and slicehost docs and] just run on your laptop, or even better on a virtual machine. Throw away your mistakes, for free. http://articles.slicehost.com/sitemap http://slicehost.com/community/ edit: [clarified]

Slicehost has an article on how to set this up: http://articles.slicehost.com/2007/10/25/creating-mx-records-for-googl…

You can do it with Slicehost's API. http://articles.slicehost.com/assets/2008/10/3/Slicehost_API-17.pdf

Some slicehost articles that might be useful to you: Setting up a Ubuntu Hardy Heron with Rails: http://articles.slicehost.com/ubuntu-hardy

http://articles.slicehost.com/2007/11/6/ubuntu-gutsy-setup-page-1 I like the Slicehost guides to getting a server up and running relatively safely. The link has some good basic server hardening tips to start you off.

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 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-f… 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.