I’ve pretty much transitioned off of Apache and PHP in favor of Nginx and Passenger to run my Rails and Python applications.

Except Even this WordPress based blog. I don’t even host it anymore, my good friend Christopher has allowed me to run it on his Colo server. Where I currently live, there are a lot of trees and power outages, so I cannot reliably run a server there.

BUT, for the few sites that I really don’t care about uptime, I’ve been working on the following:

• HTTPS virtual hosts
• Top level hosting (ie. https://zfs-tuning.org/ and not https://www.zfs-tuning.org/)
• A full nginx environment
• Using Phusion Passenger instead of PHP-FPM, uwsgi, or even Apache + mod_php
• Using federated authentication (like Google’s OpenID provider)

On of the sites, my very first domain, m87-blackhole.org, was a simple html + my own simple PHP code. I would update it every so often with a new css theme I found, and then change the running apps like mrtg, zen photo gallery, etc.., to use the new theme.

It wasn’t very usable, and that is why it stayed static.

I’ve moved on to using Octopress for both m87-blackhole and mywushublog. It is a static html framework that is generated with Ruby and Jekyll, and Deployed with rsync. This means I don’t log into a web site to edit a page, I use my existing ssh-key authentication on the systems I trust to develop, generate and deploy through git. Other sites are not using built in authentication, but some OpenID provider (Google). I just don’t feel comfortable using some waiting to be exploited statis user/password store and the just feeling stupid because I know better.

Other sites are Python or Ruby based, and Passenger does a FANTASTIC job of running those.

I may even try pushing all my post images out to S3 automatically, but I don’t want to run up my AWS bill any more.