Linode VPS Hosting

I decided to learn more about VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting and set up an account with Linode, a leader in affordable Linux VPS hosting. Basically a VPS host gives you a “slice” of a computer to use for hosting where you’re guaranteed a certain amount of the computer’s resources.  Also the virtual operating system is isolated from other user’s systems so you won’t be affected if somebody else on the server fouls up and pulls too much resources as can happen with shared hosting.

Documentation

They have a lot of documentation on their site and there are also some other excellent resources for setting up an unmanaged VPS. I also learned that there are some new things in the Linux hosting world such as the nginx web server that seems to be taking a lot of mind-share from Apache.  I was able to set up this WordPress blog on the server and it’s working well so far. The nice thing about a VPS is if you foul up the initial setup it’s easy to wipe the OS and start over with a clean version.

Monitoring

Since it’s unmanaged it can help to have an external source for monitoring the website. There are a few free ones and of course there are some good paid ones.

Linode Signup

If you’re interested you can use this link to sign up with them.