Choosing A Slice And A CF Server

The slice server, or VPS, market is getting bigger and bigger. I pointed out a few hosts in the last post, and some other users commented with their own. They all seem to be in the same ballpark of $40-$60 for a 1GB memory slice with 20-40GB of storage. Some are as cheap as $20, but most people recommend at least 512K for a Railo server. I was shopping for a slice of about 1GB as I want to host a number of sites of the box.

I'd like to say thanks to Jordan Michaels at Vivio Technologies who offered a test drive of their VPS offerings, which are geared towards ColdFusion (any engine). Although I am on a timetable to get my first few sites moved, I hope to explore and compare some other providers in future posts.

Based on my previous research, for now I chose to go with ServInt as they have been around for a long time and offer a good package of CentOS 5 with 30GB storage, 1TB transfer, and 768 RAM burstable to 1.5GB. I also liked the look of Plesk 9. It seems that Parallels bought the two best web admin interface companies and came up with a good combination of the two. Although Plesk has support for ColdFusion, we won't really need to do any configuration of our CF Engine once it's setup outside of the CF Admin.

My first instinct was that I wanted to setup a Railo server. Even though version 3.1 is still in beta, development seems to be moving along nicely so I wanted to give it a try. I have experimented with Railo on my development machiine before to make sure my apps were compatible, but only with the Express package that runs out of the box.

Although there are scattered instructions around the web on installing Railo on a VPS, I could not find anything specifically related to using ColdFusion on ServInt. The first thing we need to do is to enable SSH access for our VPS as we'll need to install Railo as well as the Apache connector for Caucho. ServInt provides MySQL, Apache, and DNS running out of the box, so we won't spend time covering setup of those items - only how they relate to ColdFusion.

The best guide I found for installing Railo on CentOS was this article on the Railo blog. Those instructions were pretty close, and I was able to get things running smoothly. I moved 6 of my domains to the server, most of which generate pretty slim traffic. One site is pretty heavy, though, and I kept running into issues with Caucho/Railo just stopping to server pages. Most of the time Apache would still function for non-CF pages, though not always.

Unfortunately, this was not a very good situation and something needed to be done. In my next post, I'll go into the solution and where things stand..