A Drupal Hosting Adventure

I've been looking into hosting options for Drupal lately, and I really haven't found anything that looked amazing that was also in my price range. I know how to administer a server, but that doesn't mean I really want to. However, once I found that there were no suitable shared hosting services, I decided to explore other options.

The Situation

One thing I've noticed is that a lot of new Drupal users use a shared hosting provider such as GoDaddy or Site5 (which is probably the best shared hosting provider I've EVER had the pleasure of doing business with). In most cases, this is a bad idea - Drupal doesn't perform well on these sorts of hosts (Site5 wasn't bad, but I could do better with root access and a VPS). My theory is that users select these hosting providers primarily based on price.

While I disagree with that criteria for choosing a web host (your website isn't important to spend $20/month on? Skip a couple more morning coffees every month!), I can empathize with it. Money is tight, and everyone is looking to cut costs where possible.

An Alternative

I spent some time over the last few days trying to find an alternative for these inexpensive hosting services. Most of what I've found has been VPS providers or Managed Server providers, which are usually above the preferred price point of website owners.

Then, I found Rackspace Cloud Servers. You get full root access starting at just $10.95/month (estimated cost).

256MB of RAM is not a lot to work with, so I had to do some thinking about how to set things up. My result was pretty surprising, especially for such a limited amount of RAM.

Okay, so it's not quite Project: Mercury, but it's pretty decent performance out of a cheap VPS.

So, you're probably asking: why would I ever do this? The answer is that you probably wouldn't. This tutorial is for people that:

• Are considering a new web host, but don't want to pay more than $11.
• Currently host their site on GoDaddy or similar and are tired of the performance problems
• Want a reasonably performant site on cheap hosting

This tutorial is not for people that:

• Get more than 30 requests per minute (one every two seconds) (seriously, if you have that much traffic, suck it up and get a bigger server).
• Aren't familiar with the Linux command line (In the future, I may automate this installation process, but it currently requires a fair bit of configuration (I walk you through it, though...it's not too difficult))
• Don't know how to troubleshoot problems that may come up (with shared hosting, you have a support department you can call. Rackspace might help with your problem, but you better know what's up when you call.)
• Are going to email me and ask a million questions about it. I wrote this tutorial so I didn't have to deal with people that chose to use crappy hosting providers. (Sorry if that sounds harsh, but that's how it is.)
• Have more than 512MB of RAM available (some of the concepts may apply, but a some of the configuration will need to change to take advantage of more memory).

Initial Setup

First off, sign up for a Rackspace Cloud server. You want the one with 256MB of RAM. If I remember correctly, they require that you do a little verification thing to enable server creation, so work with their support people to make that happen if necessary.

When you create your server, choose Ubuntu 11.04 for the operating system. Name the server whatever you'd like.

When you click Create, you will be given a root password. Make a note of this password, because you'll need it in a few seconds.

When the server is up and running, find the IP address. This should be listed on the server status page in the Rackspace control panel. For the duration of this tutorial, I'm going to use 1.2.3.4 as the IP address.

Open a terminal and type ssh root@1.2.3.4 (making sure to substitute your server's IP address). If asked about an SSH fingerprint, type yes.

Next, you'll be prompted for a password. Type in the password you were given by the Rackspace control panel. As you type, there will be no feedback, but the password is being received. Just type carefully and press enter.

Basic Configuration and Software Installation

First off, run the following two commands to ensure that all the preinstalled software is up to date:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Install all of the software we'll need (except nginx):

apt-get install php5-cli php5-cgi php5-dev php-pear php-apc php5-mcrypt php5-gd psmisc php5-sqlite sqlite3 drush

We're not installing the php5 package, since that's a metapackage that pulls in Apache, and we're not installing mysql because we're not using MySQL! Instead, we'll be using nginx and sqlite.

Next, we'll need to install Nginix. Unfortunately, the version of Nginx that is included in the default Ubuntu repositories is a bit old. Nginx provides their own repositories, so we can just use those!

echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/nginx/stable/ubuntu natty main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys C300EE8C
apt-get update

Now that we've added the Nginx repository, we can go ahead and install it:

apt-get install nginx-light

Nginx Configuration

The stock configuration of Nginx is pretty good, but we'll need to make a few tweaks.

First, edit /etc/nginx/nginx.conf and change worker_connections 768; to worker_connections 1024;.

Next, edit /etc/nginx/sites-available/default. Make it look like this, but make sure to change the server_name value to your domain:

server {
        root /var/www;
        index index.html index.htm index.php;
        server_name cweagans.net;
 
        location / {
                try_files $uri $uri/ @drupal;
        }
 
        location @drupal {
                rewrite ^/(.*)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;
        }
 
        location ~ \.php$ {
                fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
                fastcgi_index  index.php;
                fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /var/www$fastcgi_script_name;
                include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
        }
}

Set up PHP FastCGI

The PHP CGI software is already available, but we need it to start on boot. To do that, create the file /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi and put this in it:

#!/bin/bash
RETVAL=0
export PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=20
export PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN
 
BIND=127.0.0.1:9000
USER=www-data
PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=5
 
PHP_CGI=/usr/bin/php5-cgi
PHP_CGI_NAME=`basename $PHP_CGI`
PHP_CGI_ARGS="- USER=$USER PATH=/usr/bin PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=$PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=$PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS $PHP_CGI -b $BIND"
 
case "$1" in
    start)
      echo "Starting PHP FastCGI..."
      start-stop-daemon --quiet --start --background --chuid "$USER" --exec /usr/bin/env -- $PHP_CGI_ARGS
      RETVAL=$?
      echo "$PHP_CGI_NAME."
  ;;
    stop)
      killall -9 php5-cgi
      RETVAL=$?
  ;;
    restart)
      killall -9 php5-cgi
      start-stop-daemon --quiet --start --background --chuid "$USER" --exec /usr/bin/env -- $PHP_CGI_ARGS
      RETVAL=$?
  ;;
    *)
      echo "Usage: php-fastcgi {start|stop|restart}"
      exit 1
  ;;
esac
exit $RETVAL

Next, make it executable, start the process, and instruct the system to run it on startup:

    chmod +x /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi
    /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi start
    update-rc.d php-fastcgi defaults

Lastly, restart Nginx and the PHP CGI processes to make sure all configuration options have been loaded:

service nginx restart
service php-fastcgi restart

Test

Now for the moment of truth: let's see if this setup actually works!

Create the directory /var/www (if it doesn't already exist), then create /var/www/index.php with this in it:

  <?php echo phpinfo(); ?>

Open a browser and point it at 1-2-3-4.static.cloud-ips.com (remember to replace the first part of that URL with your IP address). You should see the PHP info page right away. Check to make sure SQLite is available, as well as APC. If that's the case, then we can move on. If not, do not continue until you figure out what went wrong.

Once this is working, keep this browser window open - you'll need it in the next step.

Install Drupal 7

It's much easier to direct this process using shell commands instead of English, so do all of this stuff:

cd /var/www
drush dl drupal
cd drupal-7.9    # This directory name may be different for you depending on when you're following this guide
mv * ..
mv .gitignore ..
mv .htaccess ..
cd ..
rmdir drupal-7.9
cd sites/default
mkdir files
cp default.settings.php settings.php
chmod 777 settings.php files/

Next, go back to your browser window and refresh the page. You should be greeted with the Drupal 7 install screen.

When installing Drupal, make sure you select the sqlite option and NOT the MySQL/MariaDB option. This server is not running MySQL, but installing Drush through apt-get unfortunately also installs the PHP MySQL database driver.

Use your new Drupal site!

This is the end of the tutorial. You can go play with your shiny new Drupal site now.

If you have any ideas on how to improve or automate this process, please contact me. I'm very interested in keeping this guide up to date. Enhancement suggestions should keep in mind that this guide is targeted at VPSes that have very small amounts of memory (somewhere in the neighborhood of 256MB).