Category Archives: Hosting
Mar 13, 2012 by Matt | Posted in Hosting
I recently installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu Server in a VMware Fusion virtual machine, so I could test some things out locally. (It’s a great way to set up a local development server with a similar configuration to your production server.) The initial setup was painless, but I had an amusing problem after. The default keyboard mapping didn’t match up with my MacBook’s keyboard, so pressing the arrow keys would lead to unexpected behavior. Obviously this is problematic behavior when the only way you have to interact with the OS is text-based…
Fortunately, the solution is simple.
You just need to run sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup and follow the on-screen prompts. You would usually use the arrow keys to traverse the menus, but that isn’t exactly possible, is it? Pressing the first letter of the option you’re looking for until it cycles up and is selected works fine, though. (Apple Laptop, USA-style layout, etc.) The full instructions on what you should pick for MacBooks are available here.
Now, moving in and out of the VM window is a little bit annoying, so I installed an SSH server.
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Feb 9
You may have heard about how people speed up their websites by offloading images, CSS and JavaScript from their server to a Content Delivery Network like Amazon CloudFront. The CDN mirrors the files in separate datacenters and serves them up from the one closest…
Oct 28
I have hosted Webmaster-Source, along with my other websites, on VPS.net since September of 2009. It has been an excellent experience overall, and has provided me with an opportunity to get my hands dirty and gain some hands-on experience configuring and maintaining a web…
May 4
Customers of the well-liked VPS service Slicehost will be shutting down sometime over the coming months. Rackspace, the company that acquired Slicehost back in 2008, says that this is because of the difficulty of managing “two brands, two control panels and two sets of…
Feb 21
Amazon S3, the inexpensive storage service, now can be used to host entire static websites. Though the service will accept any kind of file, which makes it great for keeping large or frequently-accessed data (podcasts, software downloads, JavaScript widgets, etc.) off your server, until…
Oct 1
Are you planning on moving from shared hosting to a more robust hosting platform, such as a VPS? It’s easy enough to find a provider, such as VPS.net, Linode or Slicehost. But that’s just the beginning. You have to learn how to set up…
Aug 18
If you run alternative server software like NGINX or Lighttpd instead of Apache, you know very well about how you need to run PHP as a standalone FastCGI daemon. (This is because there is no equivalent to Apache’s mod_php.) If you have the faintest…
Jun 21
We ignore the support questions and pass the savings on to you. Not lazy. Efficient. That’s the slogan for No Support Linux Hosting, a company providing ridiculously cheap web hosting. You pay $1 per month for shared hosting with 1GB of disk space, a…
Apr 19
I have a review of VPS.net, the hosting provider I use, which I wrote several months ago. It’s given me a chance to observe an interesting occurrence. Despite my positive review of the service, a disproportionate number of comments are decidedly negative in tone.…
Apr 12
Podcasts are fun to create, but they can be expensive to host. Typically they’re larger than 10 megabytes, and when you have a thousand plus people downloading each of your weekly episodes, your bandwidth bill can get pretty large. (They can also eat up…
