Now Fully on Railo!

Well, I’ve finally moved everything over to my Railo  VPS, including this blog & website, and all the various sites I host. It’s been surprisingly easy – the biggest challenge has been getting the necessary Linux admin skills, and the initial install of Railo/Tomcat.

Things I’m loving about the move so far:

  • Being on Apache / Centos – if nothing else, this has made the whole enterprise worthwhile; my previous hosting, as good as it was, was simply far too limited in terms of space, bandwidth, and most importantly flexibility. Apache give me .htaccess & virtual hosting, whereas before, I was using ISAPI rewrite, which just doesn’t compare (at least in it’s v2, v3 is substantially better). Disk space and bandwidth on Windows servers is just more expensive per MB, most likely due to licensing costs.
  • Railo – the access to a server / web admin combo is a massive step up from standard CF shared hosting: the ability to have shared mappings (think frameworks, shared customtags, shared error handling, shared CFCs) alone has saved me hours of work
  • Slight ‘smug factor’ of running completely free open source software (and submitting bugs to the Railo queue!).

I’ve also moved this blog over Mango Blog from BlogCFC (sorry Ray!), for a couple of reasons:

  • the lack of an update feature in BlogCFC was killing me – having to redo all the theming every time there was an update was just the straw that broke the camel’s back;
  • themeing in Mango Blog is insanely simple, so simple, the theme I’m using here I decided to release to the wider Mango Blog community (it’s available in the Mango Blog admin as ‘OxAlto Capita’)
  • for speed, I really do like having a Rich Text Editor.

The less good:

  • Well, everyone hits a linux permissions issue at least once, don’t they?
  • Managing to delete the root account on my MySQL install – that was less than clever. At least now I know how to boot mySQL in safe mode and fix it.
  • trying to persuade ntp to use a certain UK server pool