[GRLUG] Cloud VMs, Hosting, & CMSs [Was: NOT LINUX - broadband]

[Michael Mol]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 9:41 PM, Adam Tauno
Williams<awilliam at whitemice.org> wrote:
>> > Ah, I'm a sys-admin.  If I never had to touch hardware again I'd be
>> > thrilled. :)  I just want my services portable.
>> I love mucking with hardware, but that's unrelated.
>
> Oh, I enjoy mucking with it.  I don't enjoy *supporting* it!   It will
> inevitably fail on a Friday afternoon, during month-end, or as I'm
> wrapping up a large project.

Same applies to supporting and configuring software. :-|

>
>>  My thought is
>> that the fewer people who have access to the database containing my
>> users' preferences, password blobs and email addresses, the better.
>> I've been offered free hosting in a couple different places, one on an
>> otherwise *unused* machine with four logical Xeon cores and 16GB of
>> RAM, but I don't know the people who offered well enough to trust them
>> with that data. (With my daily full, versioned remote backups,
>> restoring the site to another server after a server takeover would be
>> nearly trivial, but still...)
>
> An understandable position.  Just as an Admin and not a Developer I'd be
> less prone to worry about that - there is so much more low hanging
> fruit.
>
>> Granted, I'm far more likely to be nailed by a Wordpress or MediaWiki
>> hack, but there's not much I can do about that without dropping those
>> applications. (Though I am planning to switch away from WP.)
>
> Do you find WP to be breach prone?  I haven't working with either of
> these.

No, but there are frequent releases of security patches, and its
self-update mechanism requires me to open up FTP, which I won't do,
and so I'm left with manual updates.  My bigger reason, though, is
that WP is a resource hog, even with caching plugins installed.  I'd
much rather use something like Movable Type, where the vast majority
of requests are served up as static files, and PHP is only touched
when posting.

Here's my detailed explanation of the last couple weeks...
http://rosettacode.org/blog/?p=238

>
> Have you ever looked at Concrete5? <http://www.concrete5.org/>

Haven't heard of it.

>
> I did run a Drupal site for awhile and the stream of updates was just
> unbearable - and given the general code quality I think security updates
> to Drupal are pretty much just treading water.

Likewise for WP.  And for a guy who has maybe ten minutes a weekday to
spend on administering, that's a real problem.  Weekends get more
time, but aren't always available.

-- 
:wq