So, it looks like I’ve gone full circle.

About a week and a half ago, I noticed some major increases in response times from my server.  Even when working in the terminal.  Any command had a 5 second delay from when it executed.  My site wouldn’t load in under 10 seconds.  It was timing out when checking my email, and I was getting error emails sent on the various processes I was running.  Continue reading

As long as I’ve been running a box on linux, all the tutorials and documentation I’ve read have been geared towards integration with a control panel (line cPanel or Virtualmin or ISPConfig).  That’s all fine and good, but when you’re operating a box from your house, or a VPS, you don’t want to pay for the licensing fees or have them installed as the memory hogs they can be.  Not to mention the fact that many of them suggest that you run your user’s sites out of the /var/www/ directory – not exactly a recipe for success, in my opinion. 

I’ve long preferred the standard method of rooting users to the /home/ directory.  It works, and you can lock a user to their individual folder.  Unfortunately, with the way most installations go, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to accomplish. 

Continue reading