My rent on my shared garbage VPS is up in early August and I’m not sure what to do. I’ve got two problems and a number of routes I could go.

I know very little about server admining and hosting. Next to nothing I’d say. I would like to learn, but like anything, there’s an opportunity cost to it. I’m leaning towards not taking the easy way out this time, simply because I know some more advanced knowledge of Linux will most likely be useful sometime in my not-so-distant future.

My first problem to solve is what platform is best for this blog. I started on Wordpress because it’s ridiculously easy to leave all the technical stuff aside and just get to writing. Unfortunately, I don’t know any PHP and don’t much care to learn it, so hacking on it is out of the question for now. And if I’m not going to try to deal with PHP, I might as well put my eggs in one basket and try to hack on a Rails blog framework. So I guess my real problem is how to migrate the few posts on here over to a Rails platform (after setting it up of course).

Seeing as I’ve decided not to continue on with Wordpress and switch to Rails, the next item on the agenda is where to host it.

  1. Stay on my current garbage VPS for another year. This is what I'd call the easy way out. I could leave the WP version of this blog and the rest of my site up and give myself some time to migrate over. While supposedly my VPS does support Rails, I don't get command line access without paying some ridiculous fee, and I have no idea what its capabilities are.
  2. Set up something on Heroku. I was exploring Heroku a little bit over last weekend, and things there are looking rather nice. However, I think it may end up being too complicated for the low-key hodge-podge of things I'd be running on it. At some point in the future I'd like to deploy some stuff there just to check it out in greater detail.
  3. Set up a VPS on Linode. I feel like I would easily learn the most on this route. I'd get a chance to really dig into a Linux distro and learn how to set everything up manually. I know there are a ton of great tutorials out there for doing pretty much anything on a fresh install. The only downside is that I'm sure it would pretty much every waking moment of my freetime to get everything I need up and running to the capability I'm at right now. I'm just not sure I have that kind of time to devote to this right now.

With all that being said, I looks like maybe my best option is to go with #1 (as much as I feel like I’m wussing out), and shoot for #3 next year. That will give me some more time to get a better hold on Rails.

If anyone else has been in this boat before, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.