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IcerocketOver the last few months I have been working on putting a server together, to host my and clients sites. Cutting monthly hosting costs and hardware additions (memory) was another reason for me to buy and manage my own server.
I was very picky about what type of server (name, cpus, memory, disks) and how easy / difficult it would be to expand the server in the future. Thus I had to do a lot of reading. I never learned much about servers as a web developer, all the fine details of loading / managing / updating a server was new to me. Being a web developer, we learn server basics related to what the server supports and how to modify some configurations. I learned a lot during this process. It was fun!
After painful hours of reading, asking friends and fine folks in IRC, and then more reading, I decided to go with this server. I installed CentOS 5.2 and am running Virtualmin Pro to manage the box and server space for each domain. CentOS is Open Source as well Virtualmin. Both are solid and stable products with strong communities. OpenSource rocks!
Learning about Virtualmin and all it's glory reminded me of the first year of learning Drupal. There were lots of new words/ideas that confused me because I called those ideas something else. The stumbling block with Drupal was mapping lots and lots of new words, concepts and ideas to different sections of Drupal and Drupal modules - with my "old" ideas. Virtualmin had a very similar learning curve. Being a cPanel user I was looking for the sub-domains option in Virtualmin only to find out it is called something different. Mapping out new words... to old ideas...
This new server, (I named it Tricera from Triceratops - one of my favorite dinosaurs) is sitting inside Wintek (unfortunately their website doesn't match their services). I decided to do colo close to home just in case I need to make hardware changes to the machine. A few ISPs in Chicago were a bit cheaper but Chicago is 3 hours away. Pinging Wintek's nameservers come up quicker (20ms quicker) than my rented box, which I am surprised and happy about :)
The coming weeks I will be migrating the sites from the rented box to Tricera. I have moved a couple of sites today and so far Vitrualmin has made the process flawless. I was very impressed there were no major hiccups.
