Last Thursday I finally signed up for a Linode VPS. I almost signed with Prgmr.com after reading this review, but Linode clearly won Eivind Uggedal’s benchmark test, which must embarrass Rackspace and Amazon EC2.
The custom control panel is like totally radical dude. No, it’s not a Cpanel/Plesk replacement, although it has tabs for billing and support. Part of my desire for a VPS was to wade the waters of commandline customization, but you can’t deny the smart organization of Linode’s VPS dashboard. On the dashboard I get CPU, transfer and disk-IO charts of my virtual server, which are more specific than what I get with Media Temple. (Media Temple combines those three charts into a “GPU” chart using a super-secret formula, unfortunately it’s a Flash chart which is very slow and often offline for maintenance.)
With Linode I get to choose my own datacenter! I almost went with a NJ VPS to better connect with Europe, but I decided on a Dallas VPS which is just about three hours from where I live. What can I say, I love Texas.
Community. Unlike Prgrmr.com, Linode has an active forum. So if I get stuck on a problem, I’m sure I can get help on Linode’s forum. This also impressed me: Linode has a blog feed. I scanned that feed and found the author of WP Super Cache in there.
I had spent the week researching VPS options and was really excited to get going. But I had an finance exam to study for and I procrastinated. Well, Saturday morning I took the test (A-) and when I got home I booted up Fedora 11 on my VPS for the first time. I followed these instructions to get NginX working on Fedora with PHP/MySQL. Why NginX? I hear it’s faster than Apache. I may post a revised version of that tutorial, as I found some of the commands were unnecessary, also it fails to mention you need to install PHP, which is why my index.php “Hello World” script wasn’t working until after 2am. What a thrill, my own web server to customize! More on that later.
Now I need a ton of traffic to swamp my latest project, then I can post some actual Linode+Fedora+Nginx stats.