GoDaddy Shared Hosting Versus Private Server

For years I have been a loyal customer of GoDaddy, simply on the basis of their ridiculously low prices. Considering I have always been on a tight budget, I enjoyed access to my own space to put my web applications and everything else. I got tons of space, tons of bandwidth, and access to several of the controls and tools that I needed.

But after a while, their deluxe shared hosting plan wasn't enough. Although their domain registration was great, I couldn't expect a shared hosting company to fulfill my needs forever. After long debate and much self encouragement, I took up the initiative to setup my own private dedicated server. After all, the support I found on GoDaddy was never amazing: they almost always claim the problems you encounter are a scripting issue that they don't support.

My first task to think about was the operating system. I knew it had to be some form of Linux, otherwise I would end up with Windows based headaches for the rest of eternity. I had some previous experience with Ubuntu, and after reading about Ubuntu server edition I decided to run with it. Next, I of course needed a system. I had an old PC with some basic specs that I knew would be able to handle it with ease. It wasn't the fastest or newest system available, but it would still stack up well.

Installation went fairly smoothly. I installed the operating system rather quickly: it was the easiest part of the entire procedure. Then I had to go about installing a web server. I chose something that could be heavy duty if my sites ever explode with popularity. My plan was to incorporate mongrel with Apache's virtual server and load balancing capabilities. After hours and hours of searching, I finally came across some useful articles on Slicehost. They gave me everything I needed to get my Ruby on Rails webserver fully up and running. There were some issues with Apache not doing what I expected, but eventually things started working.

The performance so far has been amazing. GoDaddy typically ran Ruby on Rails using FastCGI, which crashed at least once every five minutes. Occasionally my users got errors as a result, causing minor headaches considering every time I tried to fix the error message it caused problems with GoDaddy's server. I've had next to zero issues, aside from the occasional programming blunders, and my pages have been served up at blazing speed.