I love using Linux to do my work. My best usage of Linux is my web server, although I recall I read once that Linus never intended for the kernel to be used as a server. He was more focused on using the kernel in desktops. I’ve been running my own web server for almost a year now, which runs two websites mibrahim.net my real estate website, and clker.com a to be online clipart website - we’re halfway there.
The fun part is simply everything just works. You’ll have all the tools you need starting from database engines like postgres, mysql to scripting languages like php, ruby with different types of webservers apache, lighthttpd and others. All the tools you might think of are there and under your own hand. Building your own server is not expensive - around $100 will do it. You don’t need a super quad core machine to produce extremely fast websites, unless you are already getting more than 50 page requests per second and at that point you will need something faster.
The performance bottle neck is never the CPU, it’s the hard drives read or write speeds. You can improve on that using fake RAIDs. Almost all Linux distros offer fake RAIDs and that is the cheapest way to improve the read speed.
Setting up your server is not a hard process. The best distributions that I recommend are Debian and Ubuntu. The reason is the very large library of software that comes with each. I believe that now the full distribution has grown more than 11 CDs. I used to run Debian and switched to Ubuntu a year ago and the reason behind the switch is the faster updates I get from Ubuntu, which enables me to use more recent and updated versions of PHP and the database engines.
The easiest setup is using the Ubuntu server CD, which is not any different from the desktop CD in terms of binaries. The only difference is that it won’t install the X11-server (GUI) and the window managers (gnome or kde) and the install program itself runs over the console and not VGA graphics. I use the server installation, and connect to my server using ssh. I have another old machine that runs Ubutu as well, and is used to run freenx. By that way I keep the server’s memory for the services running, and I can add all the GUI programs I want on this old machine.
Since I greatly benefited from running my own web server, I will share my experiences every now and then when I’ve got time to write.
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