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

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Wed, 2009-09-02 at 21:54 -0400, Michael Mol wrote:
> 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. :-|

True, but I can fix software from home, or even the beech!  As an admin
that is one of the best upsides of virtualization - even if the "server"
refuses to boot I can fix it from wherever I am and don't have to run to
the data center and stand there on the tile floor.

> >> 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.

Ah,  I feel the same way about FTP.

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

<quote>
onveniently, mod_php doesn’t time out within  any time frame that the
average Web user will notice.  Inconveniently, mod_php will not work
with Apache’s mpm_worker (Would someone mind making mod_php and
extensions thread-safe?), so the server is still stuck with a separate
copy of all of PHP’s static runtime
</quote>

I wouldn't hold your breathe.  My solution has been to just try and get
as much stuff off of PHP as possible - PHP is going nowhere as a
platform.  If they did clean up the mess that is currently PHP I'd image
they would break so many applications one might as well jump ship
anyway.

> > Have you ever looked at Concrete5? <http://www.concrete5.org/>
> Haven't heard of it.

Hmm.  I honestly haven't really found a CMS I like, or more
specifically, trust.

> > 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.