So as you may know this site was hosted on my old Pentium III on the RIT campus network. Due to graduation I needed to find new hosting to avoid downtime. Let me tell you, the vast majority of hosting out there sucks. They mostly target the stupid Joe Schmoes, the small businesses and the people who need giant server farms. There isn’t much outside of co-location that targets technological individuals such as myself.
I considered some co-location, but I think I’ll have to set that as a long term goal. I need money now for a security deposit on an apartment, not for another computer. Luckily I found Linode. Basically what they do is utilize the user mode Linux technology to turn one giant server into 20 or so normal servers. Then they sell each of the 20 servers to people like me. UML is really cool because what it does is virtually turn a single physical hardware computer into as many fully functional Linux machines as you want. It’s kind of like VMware, but for Linux only and 1000 times more powerful.
Originally I was hesitant about getting it. I was afraid it wouldn’t be powerful enough. But it was the only place that was providing complete root control of a Linux box for a reasonable price. So I took it and I can say so far I am very pleased. The web interface is especially nice. I can reboot the computer all i want and re-image with any distribution from their image server at the push of a button. I’m running Gentoo as always and administering it the way I like. And despite being a bit low on RAM I’m still pulling through quite nicely.
One thing I would especially like to note is that user mode Linux is free like all open source stuff. You can turn your computer into 50 virtual Linux boxes if you want at no cost. No other OS I know of has a freely available and high quality way to run multiple copies of itself on a single piece of hardware simultaneously. I know BSD has the jails, but its not the same. UML rules, this site will be hosted for a long while. Hooray and hooray.
