Over the next week or so I’ll be working on migrating this site from Apache to nginx, as well as altering the way that various URLs map to sites/applications. I will be trying very hard to avoid any service interruptions by fully testing my nginx configuration before replacing Apache, but who knows what might happen.
To give some insight on this, I am switching to nginx because the primary performance bottleneck on the server is available RAM, and nginx tends to be extremely conservative with RAM while also consuming less CPU resources.
I’m altering the URL mapping configuration to better cope with the fact that I host many different services on the primary www.chrishowie.com virtual host. The first one I installed was this WordPress blog, and I installed it at the virtual host document root. This means that any sites hosted on the same virtual host effectively live in the same URI-space as my blog, and I really don’t like this. After the migration, each site will have its own subdomain to better isolate them. Right now, the subdomain configuration is very simple:
- www.chrishowie.com hosts this blog and several applications.
- chrishowie.com redirects to www.chrishowie.com.
After the migration, this will change:
- www.chrishowie.com will be deprecated. Various URIs will redirect (with HTTP status code 301 “Moved Permanently”) to other subdomains in an effort to preserve the functionality of existing incoming links.
- blog.chrishowie.com will host this blog.
- chrishowie.com will host a simple static “business card” type site, linking to my blog and a few other applications.
- Other subdomains will be created as necessary to support the other applications running on this site.