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Is it really that involved to manage your own server? Especially if you are starting out and its just one or two servers. There's so many good guides out there

Is it really that involved to manage your own server? Especially if you are starting out and its just one or two servers. There's so many good guides out there that I would say might be worthwhile to spend that time now.

bliti 13y ago
It does take time due to the security risks to be managed. But its not that much time and can be mostly automated. If the OP is new to server management then it might be a bit uphill.
- bryang 13y ago
  I am new to server management but I've got some much better dev guys on my side too. This is my mostly for my own research and seeing what the community thinks! This is all super helpful as this is my first major undertaking.
- avenger123 13y ago
  Have you done any Django installations? I have a VPS with Ubuntu 12.04 and looking at how best to go about this? Currently looking at Chef.
  - caw 13y ago
    I run a Django app on AWS Ubuntu machines managed by Chef. I have my own chef server, but you could also do hosted Chef to avoid the extra infrastructure. Basically chef bootstraps the node from EC2, since you can only give it an initial keypair. Chef server will SSH into your box and install user accounts, the firewall, the webserver, tweak some settings (like mounting EBS volumes, restricting SSH, etc), install virtualenv and python. We use fabric to deploy, and that's when the code installs Django and whatnot in the virtualenv, as well as put the code on the machine. Can't tell you if Chef is the best option. It's what I've been learning but it does have some rough edges. Finding the "right" cookbook is hard, because Opscode's listing isn't always the best. If you have concerns about using any particular setup to keep your environment homogenous (e.g. all init, upstart, runit, or supervisor) you'll have to put in quite a bit of work.
  - olivierroy 13y ago
    I'd recommend using Ansible instead. I've found it to be much simpler than Chef and Puppet, especially if you only have 1 server to manage.
gexla 13y ago
There is, more so than Linode for example. EC2 isn't a hosting provider. The instances can just disappear and everything on that instance is gone. If you are going to host a site there and do it right, then you need to fire up multiple instances and wire them together. There are tools to help with this. For persistent data storage, there is EBS. There are also tools available to running your application across multiple servers. These tools also create more complexity and failure points. For example, I believe EBS has been the cause of sites going dark in past AWS outages. Then you have AWS challenges such as crap IO on the smaller instances and more cost / complexity for getting around that. Dealing with all this gets expensive for the "just starting out" stage. It's probably okay for the "middle" stage when you are getting a lot of growth and have the cash to spend. If you are just starting out, it's best to go with a more conventional provider. I'm not a guru with AWS or systems admin in general, but these are the sorts of issues I have run into in the past.
- dirktheman 13y ago
  Yes, but on the other hand: if you pay for your mistakes now, things aren't that bad because you haven't got many users yet. If you're in the need of scaling things up you still have to figure out how AWS works. Who would you rather offend by downtime: 10 users while you're starting out, or 10,000 paying users a little down the road? I highly recommend getting started with AWS now. They have a free tier (1 year) which you can use. Heck, you could play around with it, just using it for the company blog. AWS is great in terms of autoscaling. True, the I/O isn't great, at least for the free tier (all the more reason to start now, while server load isn't that big yet). I wrote a blog post on starting out with AWS last year, check it out if you like.

bliti 13y ago

It does take time due to the security risks to be managed. But its not that much time and can be mostly automated. If the OP is new to server management then it might be a bit uphill.

bryang 13y ago
I am new to server management but I've got some much better dev guys on my side too. This is my mostly for my own research and seeing what the community thinks! This is all super helpful as this is my first major undertaking.
avenger123 13y ago
Have you done any Django installations? I have a VPS with Ubuntu 12.04 and looking at how best to go about this? Currently looking at Chef.
- caw 13y ago
  I run a Django app on AWS Ubuntu machines managed by Chef. I have my own chef server, but you could also do hosted Chef to avoid the extra infrastructure. Basically chef bootstraps the node from EC2, since you can only give it an initial keypair. Chef server will SSH into your box and install user accounts, the firewall, the webserver, tweak some settings (like mounting EBS volumes, restricting SSH, etc), install virtualenv and python. We use fabric to deploy, and that's when the code installs Django and whatnot in the virtualenv, as well as put the code on the machine. Can't tell you if Chef is the best option. It's what I've been learning but it does have some rough edges. Finding the "right" cookbook is hard, because Opscode's listing isn't always the best. If you have concerns about using any particular setup to keep your environment homogenous (e.g. all init, upstart, runit, or supervisor) you'll have to put in quite a bit of work.
- olivierroy 13y ago
  I'd recommend using Ansible instead. I've found it to be much simpler than Chef and Puppet, especially if you only have 1 server to manage.

gexla 13y ago

There is, more so than Linode for example. EC2 isn't a hosting provider. The instances can just disappear and everything on that instance is gone. If you are going to host a site there and do it right, then you need to fire up multiple instances and wire them together. There are tools to help with this. For persistent data storage, there is EBS. There are also tools available to running your application across multiple servers. These tools also create more complexity and failure points. For example, I believe EBS has been the cause of sites going dark in past AWS outages. Then you have AWS challenges such as crap IO on the smaller instances and more cost / complexity for getting around that. Dealing with all this gets expensive for the "just starting out" stage. It's probably okay for the "middle" stage when you are getting a lot of growth and have the cash to spend. If you are just starting out, it's best to go with a more conventional provider. I'm not a guru with AWS or systems admin in general, but these are the sorts of issues I have run into in the past.

dirktheman 13y ago
Yes, but on the other hand: if you pay for your mistakes now, things aren't that bad because you haven't got many users yet. If you're in the need of scaling things up you still have to figure out how AWS works. Who would you rather offend by downtime: 10 users while you're starting out, or 10,000 paying users a little down the road? I highly recommend getting started with AWS now. They have a free tier (1 year) which you can use. Heck, you could play around with it, just using it for the company blog. AWS is great in terms of autoscaling. True, the I/O isn't great, at least for the free tier (all the more reason to start now, while server load isn't that big yet). I wrote a blog post on starting out with AWS last year, check it out if you like.