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RDS Moves to Rackshack Like so many of my web-hosting consulting clients, my concerns over the financial and technical stability of my former web-hosting service led me to find a new vendor to host www.rds.com and a few other domains and projects. Based on Mike Prettejohn's comments about Rackshack's low-cost dedicated servers, I thought I'd give them a try. I went for their lowest-cost offer of a dedicated box with an Intel Celeron 1.3GHz CPU, 512MB RAM, 60GB hard drive, 400GB monthly transfer, RedHat Linux and Ensim Webppliance. $99/month and a $99 setup-fee. This is an entirely do-it-yourself deal. You get a ready-to-roll server, but from then on it's all yours. Rackshack will reboot the box if you kill it, but that's about it. I signed up on-line, and had access to the fully provisioned box within minutes. Not a single glitch.
It's already been an interesting experience for me. Although I've been in IT for 28 years, virtually all of that time has been spent as an executive. (The last time I had a title below VP was in 1978.) I did some major systems-level coding in the early days (writing compilers, operating systems and protocol implementations), but very little for the past ten years or so. And I've never been a sysadmin. I always had the luxury of someone else to turn to to "fix the box." Now it's all up to me.
After asking around for the best books on RedHat Linux and Apache and a quick trip to the bookstore, I went to work setting things up the way I wanted them: Perl scripts for forms, Big Brother for site monitoring, plus hardening the box and applying the latest security patches. I ran into the usual Unix/Linux problems such as getting the permissions and ownerships right and having to tweak the Apache directives--a little trickier in the virtual-host config, particularly given the Ensim Webppliance manager that thinks it's in control of everything.
I probably would have begged for help were it not for one thing: the Rackshack chat forum. Free to members, this IRC gathering is available 24x7. Even at 3am on a Sunday morning, there was someone there to answer my questions. Although the official Rackshack proposition implies very little support, I've actually found the support I've received in the chat room from Rackshack staff over the past week, superior to that for which many of my clients pay big bucks.
True, I've still got to do all the hands-on work myself--it's not a managed server--but given that I'm willing to do that (and sort of enjoying it :-)), this has turned out to be an excellent choice so far.
Posted Monday, September 02, 2002 11:05:16 AM 
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