We all know premature optimization is bad...so I spent the entire weekend doing it anyway! In order to keep up with the Joneses I swapped out debian lenny with ubuntu 9.10, apache2 for nginx, and mod_php with fcgi php. With these changes I can now run a Linode 360 instead of a Linode 540, saving myself $10 a month!

Dreamhost's uptime is a joke! If you don't believe me just check their status page. However, because of Dreamhost's utter failure I finally took the leap into unmanaged territory. Forget shared hosting, I am now officially a linoder running debian lenny, apache2, mysql, php5, and passenger. Setting everything up myself wasn't all that bad either. Linode's wiki and library were rather bare, but their forum and irc are extremely active and contained a ton of information. Overall, the best resource that I found for setting up a webserver was Slicehost's tutorials.