After my recent mention on Reddit last week, I decided to try and improve the responsiveness of my little DigitalOcean VPS even more than it already was. I was definitely happy that I was able to withstand almost 20,000 visitors in just a few hours, but thought I might be able to improve things further by switching from Apache to Nginx. I debated it a long time ago, but never made the plunge for a few different reasons. First, I typically used hosting services based on cPanel. From what I gather, cPanel doesn’t really work well with Nginx (or at all), so that was never really an option. And ...

We’re in the process of moving some servers around right now, and one of the things we need to do is move mail accounts around. I’ve been a big fan of IMAP over POP for a few years now, mainly because the messages are kept up on the server, which ultimately keeps every machine looking roughly the same. The unfortunate aspect of that is that when you move servers you have to find a way to get the messages over to their new home. One of the more obvious ways to move messages is to proxy them through your own personal machine. To do that, you simply need to set up both accounts in a mail program ...

About a year ago, I decided to slowly migrate away from Media Temple and move to something a bit better. Truthfully, Media Temple’s service was one of the worst I’ve experienced, especially since it’s priced at more than double what comparable packages are charging. I still think there’s lots of promise with their grid service, but I don’t think their paying cliental should be used as guinea pigs on technology. Unfortunately, I never completely got away from Media Temple, mainly because I have a few things there that need to be moved carefully, and I just haven’t had the inclination ...

I was walking around my apartment this evening, and came to the realization that I have a ton of computer equipment. So much in fact that some of it is piled is various corners of my place. Here’s a small list of what I have sitting around: 1) iMac Core2-Duo 2.0 GHz Desktop 2) Macbook Pro Core2-Duo 1.8 GHz Laptop 3) Intel based 1.6 GHz mini-server running debian linux 4) Quad Core 2.4 GHz Centos-based mini-server with 1 TB raid 5 storage (I use this for storing photos and other things I don’t want to lose) 5) External 350 GB USB 2.0 drive, used for time machine backups 6) Apple TV 7) External ...