Community Matters

Peter Schütte is a local photographer here in Portland who does wonderful Oregon Photo Workshops – if you are a beginner or a more advanced photographer, check out his site and the classes that he offers. They are a lot of fun and extremely instructional – I certainly have learned a lot from him and can’t wait to find the time again to go to another workshop this summer.

I’ve already done his Central Oregon High Desert Safari, the Portland at Night and the North Coastal Photography workshops (and a couple others that I’m forgetting right now). Definitely worth it.

After seeing hosting providers offer Atom based dedicated servers I started wondering how they are doing that? A pile of EeePCs? Unlikely.

Turns out there are a couple of companies offering blade servers with Atom blades – one is SERVER8 in Italy which seems to have a very smart approach – off the shelf Micro-ATX or Mini-ITX motherboards, including Atom-based motherboards can be used in a custom 6U case following the Open Blade spec.

SuperMicro offers 1U Atom-based servers and has announced an Atom-based blade server as well. There are do it yourself 1U rack mounted servers available. And I’m sure there are more similar offerings out there.

In general I guess server processors are the better fit for servers – but for this interesting niche market of people who want a dedicated server but don’t need a ton of performance (i.e. for things like hosting your own blog) these atom-servers could really be the perfect solution.

After posting about hosting your own blog a couple of days ago, one of my co-workers pointed out to me an interesting new trend that he has seen… more and more server hosting providers offer entry level servers based on Intel Atom motherboards at prices that start to compete with virtual private servers.

That’s an interesting use of the Atom processor (which I tend to think of as the netbook CPU). But for many typical blog hosting scenarios a system like this offers plenty of performance with all the advantages of having your own dedicated server – and really good prices.

InterServer offers a dedicated server (cutely named “VPS Buster”) for $39/mo. Others offer similar pricing. Nice.

(and no, I don’t get money from linking to them, sadly. It was just the cheapest that I found in a few minutes of googling – feel free to comment if you see better deals elsewhere)

I have never hosted any of my personal blogs anywhere else. And every time I talk to people who do I am happy that I was never tempted. There are way too many issues with doing that. Lack of control would be my number one concern. I want to be able to decide which OS I’m running, which version of the web server, which libraries I have available. Which blogging software and which version of it. Etc.

If you host with Blogger or Typepad or even on WordPress.com you are restricted to the versions someone else is willing to give you. You can’t change the underlying blogging tool, can’t install a new library – often can’t even install a plugin.

The other day I started hosting my wife’s blog. That brought it home to me. You want a development blog? Sure, no problem. Let me add another WordPress instance under a different hostname. You need the GD library? No problem, apt-get install php5-gd and that’s taken care of (I decided to run Debian on my servers quite a while ago). There’s a problem with xyz? Let me take a look in the log file. Very powerful. Very liberating.

Yes, some of the hosters like Dreamhost allow you something almost as good. With lots of choices and lots of control. But still, you’re in a jail – it’s just bigger and more flexible. The only way to really control what you are doing is to host the blog yourself. On a VPS or (like this blog) on a dedicated server.