I just recently bought a very low spec VPS for the purpose of hosting my small-scale projects (and for playing about with, basically
). It originally had Apache running, though it was eating up resources like no tomorrow. I'm therefore looking at the alternatives and currently have lighttpd installed.
While it is significantly lighter, I'm not sure it's the perfect choice due to some key things such as it's dodgy rewrite rule structure and the lack of support for .htacess files.
Other than those two points, I'm fairly happy with it, but wanted to know if anybody else has experience with it and maybe has a few tips on "ideal" setups for low spec servers.
My VPS specs are:
512mb guaranteed, 1GB burstable
Cheers in advance guys
I was looking at litespeed as I have past experience with it, but couldn't find many decent benchmark figures performance wise.
I like it. I've had it set up on my iPod before, nearly got SQL working, and I was actually planning to pop MyBB on there for a joke
I don't have any configuration tips for you, but if it's running ok on a 1GHz iPod Touch 4G with 50-100 MB available RAM, then it should run great on that VPS
It does run pretty well, though I have a feeling it could be optimised a fair bit. My main issue right now is with the rewrites - I'm so used to just popping a .htaccess file into place and having it just work.
Another small key issue is that MySQL seems to be taking up a fair bit of memory. And by a fair bit, running top tells me that a process with the command mysqld is running multiple times with each using 2.2% of the memory - when everything else uses less than 1%.
.htaccess is only really only meant for shared hosting because it's bad for performance from my understanding.
I've never used lighttpd but I've come to like nginx and find it pretty easy to set up and manage personally. Personally have no issues with rewrites or anything regarding it either.
Edit: And, mysql with use the most memory. You could use sqlite or try postgresql(never used it personally).
.htaccess files are supposedly bad for performance, but useful if you want to run multiple sites (I'm bearing in mind that I may upgrade the plan in the future and use it to host my actual sites).
I've heard some great things about nginx, though I've yet to try it much. In fact, I've only ever really used apache in the past (this is my first VPS) on local machines where performance isn't an issue.
Ya, but managing virtual hosts is pretty much the same as managing a .htaccess it's not that hard of change. Except that the .htaccess settings go in the virtual host configuration instead of the website directory.
Good point. That actually sounds like a far better idea. I'm just looking at nginx now and it seems one needs to have ligttpd installed anyway to run it (as one of the packages from it is required) - I may well give it a go.
lighttpd isn't required for nginx...
The only thing I can think of is if you plan on using lighttpd to process php files and nginx for static. But, I'm using nginx with php-fpm so that's not required.
Apparently it's required for FastCGI. That's not entirely needed though to be honest.
Nginx, MySQL and PHP-FPM runs MyBB great on my VPS with 128MB of RAM.
For a easy install script see
http://freevps.us/t528 (yes, that is the MyBB forum running on the 128mb VPS)