Building my own VPS (part 2 )

Part 1: http://diophung.blogspot.sg/2013/12/vps-virtual-private-server-hosting.html 

1. Moving to Linode and be aware of unknown VPS providers.

So back to 2013 (about 8 months ago), I decided to go with ReverseHosts but I faced many problems: their servers are slow, downtime was quite often (4-5 times around this year, each time it took several hours), and this thing happened yesterday: their San Diego servers shut down due to business reason ( WTH???), and the only thing I received was an email inform that I will NOT have automatic backup, and I have to request migration to their Las Vegas server.

So I decided to go ahead with linode.com - a well-known VPS provider. I chose Linode 1024 since my demand is minimum.

Well, I was blown away by the speed differences:

root@(none):/etc# wget freevps.us/downloads/bench.sh -O - -o /dev/nul|bash
CPU model : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v2 @ 2.80GHz
Number of cores : 1
CPU frequency : 2800.078 MHz
Total amount of ram : 989 MB
Total amount of swap : 255 MB
System uptime : 2:03,
Download speed from CacheFly: 64.8MB/s
Download speed from Coloat, Atlanta GA: 1.07MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Dallas, TX: 34.8MB/s
Download speed from Linode, Tokyo, JP: 12.8MB/s
Download speed from i3d.net, Rotterdam, NL: 3.89MB/s
Download speed from Leaseweb, Haarlem, NL: 9.63MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Singapore: 10.2MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Seattle, WA: 50.2MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, San Jose, CA: 59.1MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Washington, DC: 24.0MB/s
I/O speed : 770 MB/s

root@(none):/etc# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync && rm -f test16384+0 records in16384+0 records out1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 1.37065 s, 783 MB/s

I/O is superb (as expected on SSD). Cache & network bandwidth are nice, however I notice there are 2 locations with bottleneck : Atlanta GA & Rotterdam, NL.

After 2 hours with Linode, here are some of my comments:
Pros:

• Their Linux setup is on-the-fly, you have plenty of options to setup (Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS...etc) You name it they give it. 
• Awesome I/O : 783 MB/s on average ! I copied and movied GBs of data within the VPS and it take seconds.
• Network speed: In general much better than ReserveHosts (except for Altanta node?).
  Download speed from Singapore: 10.2MB/s (Softlayer node)
  Upload speed from Singapore: 600KB/s (maybe because of my Starhub ISP? Gotta try again tomorrow with better bandwidth). 

Cons:

• More expensive than cheap VPS (well, I guess the stability and speed worth it). 

2. Setting up my LAMP stack:

So now I am on a new Linux box - I'll need a new LAMP setup. My favorite and easiest installation would be XAMPP (https://www.apachefriends.org/) 

root@(none): mkdir /home/download/devroot@(none): cd /home/download/devroot@(none): wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/xampp/XAMPP%20Linux/1.8.3/xampp-linux-x64-1.8.3-4-installer.run 
root@(none): ./xampp-linux-x64-1.8.3-4-installer.run

That's it ! Next step is heading to my name.com account page, and update DNS record, pointing the domain to new IP address.

Good, now I'm back online !!!