Server Environment - The Web at Årstaskolan

Web hosting? Dedicated server? OS? Web server? Apache?

At the start of our web presence, about 12 years ago, when we had our first “homepage”, we used simple and cheap web hosting services, with Binero being the last.

Nothing against that, but we simply outgrew them. Today I manage about 50 WordPress blogs and 6 Joomla sites at the school and that requires a bit more, and above all, extended functionality.

The problem started with Kunskapshubben a few years ago. I was sitting converting videos that were to be uploaded to Hubben, even though the system could have done it for me. But the right server software wasn’t available (FFMPEG etc.). And since they weren’t our servers I couldn’t do anything about it.

About 2–3 years ago things exploded and blogging started in earnest for us. A bunch of WordPress installations had to be set up. At the same time our web host got slower and slower, resulting in long response times. Especially the MySQL database connection.

What to do? Well, jump on the self-hosted virtual server train known as VPS. An empty server you can do, basically, whatever you want with. However it meant that everything had to be installed and run by ourselves, i.e. the operating system, web server and all other software.

Glesys became the choice and I’m really happy with them. I also have them for my other private servers. It’s a Swedish company and has datacenters in, among others, Stockholm.

The setup our web server has today consists of Ubuntu 11.04 LTS as the OS, with Nginx, PHP5-FPM, MySQL and APC.

The great thing about a virtual server (call it a cloud server if you like) is that you pay by the hour and can scale up and down as needed. Is your disk space starting to run out? Add another 10GB. Not using all the RAM? Remove some. All without having to restart or stop the server.

Today we can, among other things, have our own YouTube clone in Kunskapshubben, where, for example, students and teachers can create video on their iPads and upload them via Safari to Kunskapshubben, which automatically converts the video to different formats.
Or to create WordPress blogs in minutes via WordPress multisite. The web as a tool should be accessible and easy to use and I think we’re starting to put together a good approach now.