Well, my time with bluehost as my provider is an at end. 

After I lost power at the house when I left for the holiday weekend, thus losing my email and other fun services, I decided it was time to look into other alternatives.  I settled on getting a VPS from thrustvps.com.  (A VPS is “virtual private server” – software that allow you to run another instance of an operating system within the main operating system.  Think of it as running Windows inside a Mac.)

It took me forever to get set up.  As with my home box, I’m beginning to loathe CentOS.  It’s stable, which means it also uses some packages that are years old.  That doesn’t help me much sometimes.  CentOS 5, the most recent version, is almost 3 years old now (as are most of the packages).  I tried to run Ubuntu 10.04, but something’s wrong with their template, and I couldn’t get half the stuff I needed to startup at boot time.  So, I’m on yet another flavor of Linux – Debian.

Debian is pretty much the base for Ubuntu, just slightly less friendly.  I also tried out SuSE, Fedora (brother to CentOS), and Ubuntu 8.04.  CentOS, for some reason doesn’t play well with my email push capabilities.  I don’t know what it is.  Probably the older packages, but that’s just a guess at this point. 

For the time being, the only URL that links here is www.t-gk.net.  The main URL with bluehost, www.the-gatekeeper.net will eventually be mirrored over here, once I’m sure that I’m 100% up and running and 100% stable here.  Just a matter of time, really. 

Since my VPS is limited, I have to tweak some of my applications to not be such memory hogs.  Unfortunately, my to-do list (obtained from www.getontracks.org) seems to be the main culprit, eating up nearly 10% of the used memory.  The other is apache (the actual web server itself).  It seems to want to continually start new instances, which would be fine for a major website that has tons of visitors, but I’m not getting a huge amount here, you know.