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Posts Tagged ‘web hosting’

Cloud Hosting: Slicehost, VPS.net and Media Temple Comparison Review

Disclaimer: The post indicates my personal opinion, all references about Envato are not official.

The word cloud is getting a lot of attention lately, almost like web 2.0. Marketing gimmick aside, I believe cloud computing does offer a tremendous amount of advantages over traditional computing environment.

At Envato, we use a number of providers for our server needs. We currently have servers with Media Temple, Slicehost and Engine Yard.

Even though Envato was already using Slicehost for some of their applications, I still did my fair share of research before making a suggestion to move away from Media Temple.

I have eventually nailed down to three service providers: Slicehost, Linode and VPS.net.

For Envato, we decided to go with Slicehost, because we already have some servers there, and they offer bandwidth pooling. We would have given Linode a deeper look if they had offered backups (their backups system is still in beta).

Having said that, I was very very impressed by VPS.net, so I decided I should sign up anyway, for my personal projects.

Let’s compare the three services: Slicehost, VPS.net and Media Temple.

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[How-To] Guide to Install LiteSpeed with or without Apache on LxAdmin Host-In-A-Box

This is a How-to guide for users who want to install and experiment LiteSpeed on LxAdmin Host-In-A-Box, with or without Apache.

If you don’t know what LxAdmin Host-In-A-Box is, please check out this link. Also here is a nice review. In short, LxAdmin is a free/cheap alternative web hosting control panel to cPanel.

And LiteSpeed is a high performance, lightweight commercial web server that outperforms Apache, or even Lighttpd. The standard version is free, but has a limitation of 150 concurrent connections.

All my current shared hosting accounts are using cPanel, I wasn’t a big fan of it because it was (and still is) bloated and buggy. cPanel 11 did improve a little bit so I now at least don’t *hate* to use it. I’ve been playing with different web control panels for a few years now. Did I mention I once even co-owned a web hosting company? :) I personally prefer the simplicity of DirectAdmin, and the nice interface-feature balance of Interworx-CP. Although they are very good control panels, they aren’t free. Web developers (such as myself) and programmers often need VPS or even dedicated servers to perform live testing and debugging. A free control panel seems to be a nice and affordable addition to this process. :) I had been searching for one for years. Believe it or not, all free control panels sucked at that time. They either had the feature or had the interface, but never had both. Until recently (and that was about a year ago) I had discovered LxAdmin, it is in my opinion the best overall free/cheap control panel to date. I got the free 300-domain license a while ago, I’m not sure if it’s still available but even if it’s not, it is dirt cheap. Feature wise it is much more powerful than DirectAdmin, and interface wise it is pretty similar to Plesk (which by the way I don’t really like, but still better than other free ones such as ServerCP).

I discovered LiteSpeed a few years ago and had played with it for a bit. At that time the free version still has a concurrent connection limit of 300. Anyway, the experience was pretty good. It is a shame though that the price tag for the enterprise version is a little extreme for personal use. If I had a high profile website or a company website then I would definitely consider using LiteSpeed. It has a very useful web GUI that controls all the configuration. No messing around with shell commands and files any more!

Okay that was a little background story, now let’s begin incorporating the two together.

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