Any interest in FLPR hosting?

Posted by Pat Sat, 11 Feb 2006 13:46:00 GMT

Yogi asked if I knew of a FLPR host. I don’t, but I’ve kind of been considering offering it myself. I’d like to get guage the interest level, so if you’d be interested in hosting on FLPR, let me know.

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Intro to FLPR

Posted by Pat Sat, 20 Aug 2005 07:57:00 GMT

What is FLPR?

If LAMP is the Open Source Web Platform, then FLPR is the Most Excellent Open Source Web Platform. Party on dudes.

FLPR stands for FreeBSD Lighttpd PostgreSQL Rails

Why should I use it?

This is just the opinion of one tiny web developer (but don’t worry, with FLPR, I’m going to take over the world!). There’s tons of debate all over the net on MySQL vs Postgres, FreeBSD vs Linux, Rails vs PHP/ASP/Java/FlavorOfTheWeek.

Here are my thoughts on it. I’m actually going to explain it all in reverse order. As I mentioned, there’s already a ton of exiting content debating the merits of all the various technologies. I’m just going to discuss why I use this particular setup (besides the obvious fact that it makes a cool acronym).

  • Rails – This is just a sweet, sweet web framework. That’s basically my reasoning for using it. Development is easy and just makes sense. I can code a lot faster in it than Java (my previous lang of choice), and it’s (gasp!) fun.
  • PostgreSQL – This is about as enterprise a database as you can get and still be free. Free as in beer, free as in speech. Can’t beat that. Views, stored procedures, and it’s been totally solid and lightning quick for me. I feel in general it’s superior to MySQL, and Rails has awesome support for it, so it just makes sense. Plus it’s true open source, vs MySQL’s pseudo-open source ;)
  • lighttpd – Apache is the de facto for web hosting…except in Rails apps. I’m not even sure why, really. Basically it’s taht Rails has to run as a CGI app, Rails in CGI is slooooow so you have to use FastCGI, and lighttpd + FastCGI is super quick. I’ve just played around with it a bit and it seems pretty nice so far. It’s been very stable (no crashes yet), very fast, and uses less resources than Apache. Most excellent.
  • FreeBSD – This, as they say on MTV’s Cribs, is where the magic happens. I think this is the best server OS around right now. Solid, fast, secure…and maintaining it is super easy. Best of all, I think Rails was written to run on it, because of how easy it is. Have problems installing Ruby and Rails on another OS? Not on FreeBSD! Installing the pure Postgres adapter is a cakewalk when you install from ports, compared to being a pain in every other OS I’ve tried.

Okay so as I look at that list, there isn’t really a compelling reason to use FLPR over LAMP, or any combination of OS, httpd, database, and language. I’ve used a lot of web languages and a lot of OSes, and it really comes down to feel for me. The combination I discuss here just feels right when developing, and so far it’s been a winner in production.

I think the FLPR combo is absolutely killer for developing and deploying web apps. If you like it, awesome, if not, that’s cool too. Over the next week, I’ll be posting instructions on how to build a FLPR machine from scratch. The point of this will be to build a machine that can host your web applications online, and eventually I hope to incorporate all aspects of a standard internet server (web, ftp, etc).

Why can’t I use Linux?

Cause then you’re a LLPR, and that means your apps fall apart. (I’ll be here all week, don’t forget to tip your waitress)

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