Note to GoGrid folks

Sorry for posting this over here, but it's been over a week and I still can't post on your forums. I mean honestly, people. If 80 million people or so can post on Wikipedia, surely little old me can post on your site without too much trouble.

Gogrid: I love love your concept. It's the cheapest high-bandwidth server out there, and it's dead simple to get started. But...

Yum is broken on Centos 32 bit. Ouch. Also no apt-get, which leads a n00b like me no way to quickly install apps. Also, the Centos 32 bit "LAMP" server doesn't come with PHP support for mysql. What's that all about? Hey, even XAMPP does that on Windows. Do you realize how hard it is to get a mysql driver for PHP when Yum doesn't work?

That's not even the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that your Apache server is heavy, very heavy, and when you're paying by the RAM-hour, I can't call that a coincidence.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but people on the net say each httpd instance should cost 20Mb on Drupal. Guess what--mine cost 32Mb. Yeah, each. So I have had to cut back on MaxClients to 10, which is not great. Sure, it might be a long time before my website gets 10 concurrent users, but still, on a 512Mb machine, you should be able to get more clients.

Don't tell me that I should "trim" Apache. I did. I turned off loading of SSL modules, and any other modules I could get away with. The sucker is still too big to run more than 10 servers at a time. Cripes. I'm not smart enough (or maybe the alternative these days, have enough time) to learn how to recompile Apache without all the hidden "stuff" that's no doubt stashed in there, but that may be the answer. But shouldn't we start lean, then add the "fat" stuff? Or maybe you should consider giving users control over that.

Hey, I got Drupal running under Linux--not bad for a guy with a real job. Clean URLs, too. Your forum says "Use Windows 2008 to run Drupal" Ha! That's a funny one! Windows 2008 takes 400Mb RAM just for the OS overhead, without even an http server running! So I'm spending $70 a month just to keep the power light green, then add another $70 to actually do anything useful?

You have a great service, but someone over there is trying to take advantage of unsuspecting users, probably just telling them to upgrade to a more expensive, more powerful machine if they find they can't get good performance out of Apache. That's classic bait and switch.

Just looking out for the little guy