Adrian Rossouw e-mailed me about aegir, a multi-site hosting system he had helped develop. I finally got around to trying it out on my local system, and I’m impressed. It easily handles the creation of virtual hosts and settings.php, and it can provision sites with different installation profiles. I could see people using this for the kind of Drupal hosting that many companies now do. Kudos to Bryght for giving this to the open source community!

It wasn’t difficult to get up and running. Follow the installation wizard, and you’re pretty much all set. I wonder if I can get our project to this level of awesomeness.

aegir: managing a large number of Drupal sites

My site’s been slow for a while now – so slow that even I don’t have fun flipping through it. So I’m thinking of switching over to a different site. I checked out webhostingbuzz, but they don’t offer full SSH access. Here’s what I need:

• Linux webhosting with PHP and Rails
• Proper SSH access so that I can test and run things from the comfort of a terminal
• >= 10 GB of transfer per month (who knew I used 8 GB?)
• >= 5 GB disk space (currently using 1.3 GB)
• >= 10 domains
• >= 20 databases (development and stuff)

Anything you’d recommend?

The .ph domain will be a hassle to update (maybe we should just get
that delegated?), but it might be worth switching to a new web host.

I need PHP, MySQL, mail hosting, FTP access, 1 GB storage, and
ImageMagick support. We use less than 1 GB a month. I’d like
shell access. Python and Perl support would be really fun. Ruby would
make me thrilled. I plan to set up a tagged photoblog / photographers’
portfolio.

We’re currently paying ~ USD 8 / month. I’d prefer to keep money in
the Philippines, and most of our traffic comes from the Philippines
anyway. Know of any locally-hosted servers? If not, I’ll probably go
for http://www.site5.com/hosting/comparison.php .

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