Well, I’d toyed around with the idea for quite a while, but when SSH when down for a few days at Dreamhost, I decided it was time to finally make the switch.

The easy part was moving off static sites and getting my personally hosted blog onto wordpress.com. Then of course is the real challenge: a Haskell site.

First shot: compile on the server

Since NearlyFreeSpeech.net (henceforce NFS) claims support for GHC, I thought I’d try out compiling on their servers. My first issue was that they only have 6.8.3, whereas some of my libraries require 6.10. I e-mailed them about this, and they let me know that their unstable server had it available. Switching over was painless.

However, I had a few problems with this approach:

cabal-install would not link due to memory constraints. I can manually install all the libraries I need, but that’s a real pain. All the files I ended up using used up 250MB. NFS charges per megabyte of storage, so I didn’t feel like wasting time. As usual with shared hosting, compiling is slow. It’s not as horrible as Dreamhost, where they kill the compiles regularly, but still not as nice as using my shiny new system at home.

Upload binaries

So I can of course just compile my binaries locally and upload them, right? Well, I don’t happen to run a FreeBSD box. I’ve been itching to try out VirtualBox for a while though, and this seemed like a good time to do it.

I know what you’re thinking: I’m a masochist, and this is overkill for this kind of project. However, setting this up didn’t actually require too much work, and it’s a much more durable solution than trying to compile binaries on some flaky shared host (looking at you again Dreamhost).

Anyway, the process was very straightforward:

Download the FreeBSD 7.2 ISO (NFS beta realm runs 7.2). Install VirtualBox locally. Install FreeBSD. It’s not too complicated. But make sure you set aside enough hard disk and RAM. Update ports collection. This was the worst part for me, since I’ve never used FreeBSD before. Also, I tried a selective update at first: bad idea. Just update the whole thing. Install ghc. Basically, “cd /usr/ports/lang/ghc && make install”. It takes a *long* time as it installs everything. Compile the binaries inside FreeBSD. I used git/ssh to transfer to projects over to the virtual machine, which was very convenient. Upload binaries and call it a day.

Other notes

I have opted not to use NFS for my large static file hosting. I’m using the Amazon S3 service, which so far I’ve found to be much faster than Dreamhost. It’s a little tricky to get started though. I was able to sync all my photos using s3sync.

Also, don’t forget to strip your binaries before uploading them, it can save a lot of time.

NFS only supports CGI. This is fine for my purposes, but others may not be so happy with it.

Finally, NFS recently started charging $0.01/day for dynamic sites. It’s only $3.65 a year, but if you’re like me and like to have lots of different sites running, it might add up. I’ll probably just end up running services under the same domain name instead of separate subdomains.

Conclusion

Well, I won’t give my full stamp of approval on this yet, but so far I’m impressed. I’ll try to post some follow-up on this in the future.

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