NYCPHP Meetup

[Cliff Hirsch]

Well, I settled on cvsdude for Subversion, Bugzilla and Trac. 

And I'm giving a XEN-based VPS provider a try -- will report back my
experience.

On another note, wasted a few bucks and a few hours trying Dynamic DNS
to just use my office dev. server, which is behind a Firewall and NAT.
Fugetaboutit... Talk about a pain. And then there's all the fine print
about "if your service provider blocks port 80..." Waste of time....

-----Original Message-----
Greg Rundlett greg.rundlett-at-gmail.com |nyphp dev/internal group use| 
wrote:

>On 3/10/06, Cliff Hirsch <cliff at pinestream.com> wrote:
>Another option I'm honing in on is VPS -- looks pretty reasonable and 
>flexible.
>
>Caution.  I know other people have obviously had positive experiences 
>with VPS and/or 'root servers' from 1&1 or other companies.  I did not.
>
>I found it to be one of the most dissatisfying experiences of my 
>consulting career.  I wasted 10x the amount of time I would have spent 
>just doing the sysadmin work myself.  The installation and setup of my 
>accounts were buggy.  The software (cPanel or Plesk) were useless. That

>software is not nearly as useful as Webmin.  More than anything, 
>managing the server through the terrible 'control panel' was the really

>bad part.  And there was incongruous language in their advertising and 
>TOS that ended up biting me too.
>  
>
Now that someone has said this, I will agree.

I still use Westhost Virtual Server accounts for a few projects, and I 
*think* I appreciate that I don't have as many sysadmin/security 
concerns as I have with other dedicated servers. However, I find the 
control panel (which is actually a PHP/DHTML application) horribly slow 
and an unwelcomed intermediary between me and the system. Luckily I can 
ssh in for *most* things when I want to.

If you want to re-install a base system, though, it is pretty easy to 
reset the virtual server and start fresh. Not sure how often I could 
accomplish that with the dedicated servers without being ready to pay 
for some hands-on support or make a site visit.