With the arrival of Fall, my favorite season, I’ve turned a new technical leaf.

My web hosting requirements have outgrown my shared environment of 6 years (who seems more concerned with marketing their carbon neutrality than offering competitive hosting value), so I started looking into options for a more performance oriented setup. After a good bit of research I decided to go with a pair of Linode 720 Virtual Private Servers (VPS). I’m now hosting several sites as well as facilitating quite a few web-based utilities on one production and another development oriented server.

Linode offers several tiers of hosting based on dedicated allotments of memory, disk space and bandwidth - ranging from $20/month for their smallest package to $160/month for a monster with 3GB of RAM and nearly 100GB of disc. In addition, they also offer an a la carte upgrade system where you can add even more memory, disk space, bandwidth or static IP’s. They offer 16 different Linux distributions to cater to those who prefer a particular variant.

The trade-off is the environments are unmanaged. They keep the power on, the net accessible and the disks from croaking - other than that, you’re on your own. The reality of assuming responsibility for security, configuration and backups can be intimidating at first, but anyone familiar with Linux and networking fundamentals can setup a fairly reliable and secure server, especially considering the wealth of online documentation and how-to information. I spent about a week migrating my sites over, setting up security, backup jobs, SSL keys/certs, Apache/MySQL/PHP configuration, DNS setup and testing.

The luxury of tweaking the LAMP stack for applications such as Drupal and Wordpress enables substantial performance gains - especially the former. My largest site, ResoNation was limping along sluggishly in the shared environment. The flexibility of custom configuration along with advanced caching optimizations cut page load times by ~75%.

I increased my monthly hosting bill by $30. For the extra money I upgraded from 4GB of disc space to 48GB, from 240GB of monthly transfer to 800GB, and I increased the performance of all sites involved significantly. Additionally, I now have a fully redundant source code repository, a development mirror of the production environment and plenty of on-site storage for media content. At the current loads I have more than enough hardware to host several additional sites.

If you’re looking to step up from the restrictions of a shared environment, you can checkout Linode’s offering with a 7 day trial. By the way, their sign up process, billing and setup processes are flawlessly executed. You can pay month to month and they prorate fees at signup. So far, this has been a completely positive experience and I highly recommend Linode VPS.