Chris Mueller

Server Migration

October 17, 2008

The uuorld.com server used to be hosted on a standard dedicated box at a datacenter in Los Angeles. In an effort to consolidate resources, enable flexibility for future efforts, and save money, it made sense to move all of our servers to Amazon's EC2 cloud infrastructure.

The old server had been running CentOS. I opted to go with CentOS because it was considered a secure, well-supported standard. The hosting provider's sales team convinced me that I would be a lot better off if I also had CPanel installed, so I paid a little extra for that too. (CPanel provides a web interface for common administrative tasks on the server.) There were many problems with the whole setup.

  1. I have a strong background in Debian and Ubuntu platforms, but lack the experience with RedHat based distros. This often made troubleshooting more complicated than it should have been.
  2. The default installation of CPanel and CentOS included a lot of things we didn't need, including a full up DNS server, IP logging programs, phpMyAdmin, FrontPage extensions, etc.
  3. The CentOS repositories contained old versions of a lot of software packages, and we were depending on some bleeding edge packages to provide the functionality we wanted. It was not just once that I was forced to uninstall the default packages and compile from source.
  4. We were paying a lot of money.
The move to Amazon has proved remarkably painless. After spending a day getting acquainted with the EC2 concepts and terminology, installing the Firefox extension to manage my instances, and running the setup/teardown cycle a few times, it made sense to dive in. I launched a default instance of Ubuntu 8.04 and started poking around. A few apt-get calls later, and I had the core of the site replicated. Since the Ubuntu repositories had the latest versions of all the software I needed, this was a blissfully painless process. I loaded up database backups from the old server, pulled down all the code that runs our site, modified a couple lines in the Apache config files, and the new site was working great.

I'm convinced the Ubuntu guys are saints.

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