Category: websites

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Web Hosting on a Mac Mini

The new Mac mini is out (Late-2012 model), and I’m going to give Macminicolo a try. I’m moving from the dedicated server I’ve been on for the last two years:

  • quad-core 2.83 GHz (Intel Q9550)
  • 8 GB DDR2-800
  • dual 500 GB 7200RPM SATA drives with a hardware mirror (RAID 1)
  • Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

to the faster Mac mini:

  • quad-core 2.3 GHz (Intel Core i7-3615QM)
  • 16 GB DDR3-1600
  • 128 GB SSD
  • 1 TB SATA
  • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

I’m moving because it’s less expensive and faster. Due to having to buy the Mini, my break-even point is in 12 months, but after that I’m saving money.

Compared to Amazon EC2, after two years I will have paid roughly the same as a Medium instance (2 CPU, 4GB RAM) with the 1/year reservation discount. The Mac Mini is much faster, but then, Amazon offers a lot more (paid) services and options.

The downside is that there’s no redundancy built into the Mac mini, and I become responsible for hardware failures. There’s a year of warranty built into the Mini, but after that there’s a chance I’ll be buying a new one, and my predicted savings will be pushed back a year. In case of a hardware failure, I’ll temporarily move to Amazon EC2. Being instantly available is worth the extra cost in that case.

 

 

 

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makezine.com: Dual Booting Linux and Windows XP

I just discovered that one of my websites made the printed version of Make Magazine. In issue 6, on page 124, there is a link to frozentech.com/content/livecd.php. This marks the first time I’ve been in print!

Other big firsts include being on the radio, mentioned by Leo Laporte (!) (first hour, at 20:30), being included in a presentation at LinuxWorld, and being on Slashdot, Digg, IBM Developerworks, and SecurityFocus.

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New MySQL, new FrozenTech

I felt good about my current state of the RoR FrozenTech Store so I decided to roll it out tonight. I quickly realized I would have to upgrade my MySQL from 4.0 to 4.1, something I had been putting off for a while. I followed the Gentoo upgrade docs, and they worked perfectly, but it did take over an hour to compile the new version plus all the other stuff which depened on it. That was fine though, as Christina and I watched some episodes of Battlestar from season one which we had not seen.

After everything was done compiling, I restored all the databases, checked existing sites, uploaded new files, edited apache and lighttpd config files, and restarted every service a few times. The good news is that everything looks like it’s working the way it should. There’s still a lot of tweaking that need to be done to the store and the surrounding site, but I’m looking forward to it. The Ruby on Rails environment has been fun to work with.