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Best way to host a small site on Ramnode 128mb VPS
Hi.
I have a website that gets small amounts of traffic (100 unique visitors / 24 hours).
It's like 5 pages, was originally all HTML but I switched it over to php so I can just use the include function for header.php and footer.php in every page.
What would be the best solution to host this on a ramnode 128mb ram vps.
Nginx?
I need PHP and I plan on adding mysql later.
Thanked by 1Nick_A
Comments
Of course Nginx with PHP-FPM and if you plan to use MySQL later add MariaDB .
I'm not familiar with nginx, but last time I checked the default Ubuntu install comes with apache2. I just added PHP via apt-get and that was it.
Do you have any rewrites in place?
There's no need to overthink it. If all you're using PHP for is simple templates, you can skip it and just use server-side includes (Apache or otherwise), or adopt a RAGtag approach like I did, and ditch all the extra fluff and dependencies on mods of more questionable security.
If you do actually need PHP and/or MySQL, you can walk it in piecewise. For example, I also use that same 128MB site to host some Perl and Ruby templates, but I get by with just a SQLite database. How you make the best use of the limited resources available depends a great deal on how much you want to play with the different options available, or if you think your time is better spent on other things.
If you're just using php for footer/header, better to write a script to regenerate your site (i.e., you edit a template file and then run a script to create .html and place it in the web dir). Serving purely static files is faster than php.
nginx is going to scale better and take less resources, particularly for static web pages, than apache. I'd use nginx.
If there is no rewrites, I would use Octopress to generate pages and serve it using Monkey server. It would run on a home router for 100 vistors/day.
There are many static site generators. Gives you all the flexibility of the templating and then the performance of being purely static.
Yeah and you would really notice the difference if you hosted on a 486, so this is important, as you never know and maybe you will in the future.
I mean seriously, five pages with two includes in each, and you already start advising bizarre shit nobody has ever heard of, because FASTER? Like totally on a Xeon CPU VPS the PHP will grind to a halt including two files for 100 unique visitors in 24 hours?
As for the general advice, go with Lighttpd. It's like nginx, but better (saner and easier to configure).
Octopress is pretty known as far as I know. It's based on Jekyll, the static site generator used at GitHub pages. Monkey Server is pretty new, I know, but is as very good web server for low memory environments. OP asked for opinions, so, I don't see why I shouldn't give mine.
And, as you can read on my post, I'm not advising "bizarre shit" because FASTER, but because this can run on restrained env. like a home router for a site like what OP has described.
Well, I've posted a script to install Monkey Server here: http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/846721/
If you want to know why I advise Monkey you can look at this comment: http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/845893/#Comment_845893
Jekyll and Nginx!
I agree with @impossiblystupid: if you're using PHP only to include header/footer, you can just use Server Side Includes.
For low ressources, I recommend you check nginx and it's SSI module: http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_ssi_module.html
If later you want to use PHP for others more dynamic stuff, you can also cache pages with nginx.
using centmin to host my wp blog
One option would be lighttpd, sqlite and PHP.
i thought centminmod had a very high requirement... like 512mb
yeah i thought so too. wonder where i get that (mis)conception.
https://github.com/Xeoncross/lowendscript
You can edit the script to allow instalations on servers with lower memory than that. It will install without problems, but you'll need to tweak MariaDB and PHP-FPM after installation to prevent oom.
like @EkattyLinux stated you can edit Centmin Mod's preset low mem threshold as outlined on my 128MB VPS Wordpress Centmin Mod LEMP blog at https://blog.centminmod.com/1 or via Getting Started Guide step 4 at http://centminmod.com/getstarted.html
Make sure you only do this on CentOS 6 32bit as 64bit or CentOS 7 64bit memory requirements wont work well with 128MB for full Centmin Mod LEMP stack.
I have no problems with CentOS 6 32bit + Centmin Mod with ISLOWMEM variable tweak and 128MB VPSes, you'd probably want at least 64MB swap availability at that low memory though. I run my WP blog https://blog.centminmod.com/ on 128MB VPS and also run a few standby DNS failover fail-whale backup notice VPSes for sites.
FAQ 36 has been added for this http://centminmod.com/faq.html