Dreamhost to Rackspace

So after a long time with Dreamhost. I’ve made the move to a Self Managed Cloud Server at Rackspace.

Don’t get me wrong Dreamhost has all the flexibility you would need for shared hosting but I was finding that to get the resources I needed for my VPS I would be paying ballpark the same as Rackspace Cloud Server albeit self managed.

Initial thoughts
Pro’s

• The provision of a Cloud Server was fast, very fast. Credit card and running in less than 10 minutes.
• The Rackspace Cloud Server image has a swap file and so your cloud server will behave like a normal server. i.e. when heavily loaded it will slow down and become painfully slow without rebooting or being terminated as was my Dreamhost VPS.
• The Rackspace Live Chat support is quick and you’re talking to either a turing complete program or a _real_ human boo yah!
• The transfer from DH to RS was quick quick quick. I think the data centres are very close.

Con’s

• You have to know how, or learn to configure Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL and their interdependent modules. (of course you could just apt-get yourself to a working config but then your websites would all be running as the same user and you don’t want to do that, especially if a remote exploit compromises one account)
• By the time you provision the server, compile and install a (hopefully) secure setup, it’s a couple of days before you are running. (Dreamhost and their ilk are definately worth their money when you consider how much of their configuration is just point and click)
• The Rackspace DNS Control Panel in my account is non-functional at the moment, so I’m having to ask them nicely to add records. It’s been about a week and it’s not fixed but this is not a show stopper.

Any way Rackspace FTW at the moment.

Time will tell how it performs.