Linode has a good repuation and a very nice price for a VPS, but the caveat is you have to administer everything yourself. For the last couple of days I've been slowly working my way through my checklist, filling in the gaps where I go. Actually getting everything working has been dead easy, really. It's knowing enough about what I'm doing to make it reasonably secure that's the hard part.
Currently I've got the basic LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) installation up and running, with a bit of security screw tightening. Most of this was getting used to how Debian differs from Mac OS X's flavour of BSD, which I think I'm getting the hang of. Today I've got WordPress installed with a few basic security measures in place. If all's going well, I should get the basic blog up and running for internal testing tomorrow.
Then after that: some kind of logging and statistics, email services, and the all important backup system. I'm not sure how to do most of that. That all needs to be tested too.
Then after that, once I've got backups, I'm debating whether I should just nuke the whole thing and see if I can restore it from scratch. Best I find out whether I can do that now, before I lose anything of value.
I'm hoping this will all be done by next weekend, when I can go live.
It's slow going and possibly overkill for where I am right now, but I figure if I do a good enough job now learning and setting up the basics, things will go far more seamlessly later and I'll be up to speed when I need to be.
