Lately, I've been in the business of migrating between hosting providers. We're moving away from the classic web host CentOS. The reason that CentOS became the web host OS of choice in the middle of the decade still eludes. I just imagine a some RHEL fan club being told to implement a linux web host solution with no budget and CentOS was the fruit of that effort. Our new host is of the new ultra-trendy VPS type. We chose slicehost on some recommendations from friends. I host my own blog and some other stuff on a VPS at vpslink.com.

I was investigating some web site slowness for a friend the other day. His company uses SugarCRM over https. He had been complaining about slowness for over a year and I finally decided to give it a thorough look. Since the sugar application makes heavy use of its database backend, I decided to start there. Unfortunately mySQL's slow query log turned up nothing, except that the database was running about as fast as you could possibly expect with the whole database buffered in memory. I honestly didn't think to check the web server itself because I've never really had a measurable problem with that before, default web server settings have always suited me fine in the past. Apparently all bets are off when running under SSL...