[Catalyst] Requirements for Catalyst

[Jonathan Rockway]

* On Sat, Feb 21 2009, Ashley wrote:
> On Feb 21, 2009, at 3:04 PM, Jonathan Rockway wrote:
>> We run lots of Catalyst apps on the smallest Linode.  I think they
>> give
>> us something like 340M of RAM.  This is enough.
>>
>> I use a 512M Slicehost for jrock.us, which runs my mail server and a
>> few
>> Catalyst applications
>
>
> I know this is getting pretty off topic but I'm hovering on a VPS buy
> so I'd like to hear more about why these two and what you'd say to
> someone like me whose Perl is drastically better than my admin chops.
> Put your referral code(s) if you've got them in your response too.

Sure.  Linode is cheaper and lets you use more recent versions of the
Linux kernel.  Slicehost is stuck on an ancient version of Xen that
makes it impossible to run Debian Stable (as of last week).  I went with
Slicehost because they had good press at the time, but if I had time to
re-configure my system and all that, I would switch to Linode.  We use
Linode for our work svn and web servers, client apps, kerberos, LDAP,
OpenAFS, etc., etc.  It works great.

Both Linode and Slicehost have fine web interfaces.  I can usually do
what I need to do quickly.  Slicehost takes super-agile (*rolls eyes*)
approach of "less features", but I don't really miss any of Linode's
features when I am using Slicehost.

Slicehost does have one killer feature that Lindoe doesn't -- nightly,
weekly, and on-demand full-system backups.  This saved my life when I
upgraded Debian Stable last weekend and it went horribly wrong due to
the crappy version of Xen they are using.  One click, and I was back to
my old setup, with maybe a few lost mail messages.

OTOH, if they didn't suck, I wouldn't have needed the backups.

Anyway, you need sysadmin experience if you are going to use a VPS.  You
start with a Linux system with *nothing* installed.  You log in through
a "console", install your text editor (mg), sshd, and sudo, and then go
from there.  It is not "friendly" unless you are familiar with Linux
already.  You are on your own for file-level backups (I use duplicity +
s3 for this.  It works *wonderfully*.)  Etc. etc.

As for referral codes, I think you can use my email address if you pick
slicehost. Dunno about Linode, but it is all paid for by $work so I
don't really care.

Oh yeah, one other option is Amazon EC2.  They are very scalable (a perl
script can buy you a new machine on demand), but not quite as friendly
(if your instance crashes, all your data is lost).  They are also kind
of expensive.  If you use S3, though, you can save a lot of money with
the free EC2 <-> S3 transfers.

Regards,
Jonathan Rockway

--
print just => another => perl => hacker => if $,=$"