If you are reading this message you should be on our new server!  I decided last week I was going to switch to a Linode VPS.  The Dreamhost PS service is ok for starters, but you quickly learn that your Dreamhost PS isn’t so… Private.

Last week I started noticing lag when connecting to the site.  A quick glance at my Dreamhost PS everything seemed ok.  CPU usage was low and hadn’t spiked or anything that would look suspicious.  Memory showed the same story, nothing out of the normal ranges.  However the SSH console to the server seemed a bit laggy as well.  So I checked the network interfaces with a console utility called “bmon”.

Bmon is a graphical console bandwidth monitoring tool.  Bmon showed two interfaces, eth0 and eth1.  eth0 being relatively idle, however eth1 was pegged at 11.72 MiB and wasn’t changing from that figure.

Turns out, the eth1 device I was seeing from my “Private Server” was showing me the network devices of the host server for the individual “PS” server’s.  This bothered me on several levels.

First of all my site was being lagged to hell because of another DreamHost PS customer.  It was like I was back on shared hosting all over again!!!! fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu!!!!!!

Secondly, the fact that I could see the host’s devices bothered me.  Whether or not there is any real security concern here or not I just wasn’t comfortable with it anymore.

Third was how support dealt with it.  When I talked to support one of the admin’s got to my ticket within a reasonable amount of time, but it was already too late. The traffic had died down and DH decided that it wasn’t an issue anymore.

So move to the next day, in the morning things were all good and I was back to my regular beat.  About an hour or two later I noticed lag while working on some code in the shell.  Sure enough, it was happening again.  This time I submitted a ticket saying I wanted my PS transferred to another host.  After all I couldn’t work on the server at all while it was lagging like this.  The scripts I was testing would simply time out.  And what do you know, by the time support got back to me they were able to catch the tail end of the traffic before it died down again.

At that point they didn’t want to transfer me to another host…  damnit.  But whatever, I needed to get some work done.

Third day, it happened again. *sigh…

So instead of going through all that again with support I made the final decision.  Off to Linode’s website to sign up.

So, if you’re reading this blog post you have arrived at my new home with Linode.

Later on I’ll put some stuff together about the server’s configuration.  Only because I’m damn proud of my new server setup.

-Scott

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