Finally, on Webfaction

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Slowly migrating all my sites onto webfaction, done 2 already, including this, 6 more to go.

So, why webfaction?

To put it in perspective, I had 6 sites operating off my AWS micro-instance. 3 wordpress blogs, Instasyncer , a couple of other projects that I am working on. This meant that I had to consume decent amounts of RAM, or at least more than the RAM allocated to a micro-instance. CPU was alright though. It was more than enough.

Now with the RAM as the bottleneck (no, I’m not kidding, I had times when malloc failed, and it failed really noisily), I had 3 options. Move off AWS, add a swap partition, or upgrade to a larger instance.

  • Move off AWS

    Now this would be a pain in the ass. You have to first find another service provider, and then move all your sites. Didn’t want to do that much work, so nope, didn’t migrate.

  • Add a swap partition

    It shouldn’t be that bad right? I mean how much can it cost? (At least that’s what I was thinking earlier)

  • Upgrade to a larger instance

    No way. Micro to Small is a BIG difference. No way I’ll be willing to part with so much money just to host a few personal projects.

So I added the swap partition. (Note: I did play around with the httpd.conf file. There was one point where I tried having only 2 httpd processes but it didn’t work out. It was overloaded.) And I changed the swappiness to 0(minimum swapping, to reduce ebs IO costs. I checked the bill 6 days later. I had racked up 9 million EBS I/O operations. 90 cents over 6 days. Extrapolate it to 1 month, and it would cost $4.50. Little, you may say, but not to a uni kid. Not only that, the only reason why I had to pay of IO was because they refuse to let S3 work on micro-instances. If S3 worked on micro-instances, i think I would still be using AWS.

So yea, switched over to Webfaction, and I have to say, I am very happy with it. At least so far. I can run my mongo stuff on it, I have shell access and can compile crap on it, and I don’t really have to worry much the next time I post something up on HackerNews. Downside is I don’t get to play with the sysadmin stuff anymore =( RTT is still pretty decent. So yup, happy with it :) Haha.

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