Well, I finally did it..and used centos.
I started out in 1997 with my little website with not much on it. It was a shared host account. Eventually I added some more sites and got to grow out and went to this new fangled thing called VPS.
Lots of problems plagued me throughout that experience, some on ensim control panel, some on others. When chost.net (think that was their name) blew up (1999 ?) and I lost my sites I moved to OLM. Finally got big enough to go to the dedicated thing. My own server, managed by the hosting company. Years of that turned stale as recumbent issues of updating and control panels just made it not so good.
I made the plunge and built my own server and colocated it. Only problem, which software. I decided on rhel, but found the support so stunningly unknowledgable I moved to centos since it made no difference free or paid, no tech support is really there anyway. And I do not like redhat having access to my servers like that.
It was a long long trial by fire to learn sysadmin with linux. But lessened by the huge amount of pre-setups that are done with a centos install. I look at web pages and books that talk about untarring, installing and compiling, and just pass right by them (scared one day I may have to do that stuff).
It was not easy making the jump. Especially deciding not to use a control panel. However, today, just minutes ago, I moved the final website from the dedicated host to my own server and cancelled the account.
It is just a wonderful and elated feeling to know I have a good server with redundancy, great raid mirror, awesome software, great company updating security patches and a great company that repackages that for me from redhat.
So far, other than the hardships of learning how to build the dang webserver with a ton of poorly instructed programs, centos has been sturdy, stable, and works like a charm, almost out of the box!!
I would never want to repeat the experience of learning this stuff for the first time...never. But now that I passed what I hope is the last hard bump in the road, I can finally get some sleep, go outside, and start programming more websites.
Thanks centos.
And yes. I am compiling all my notes from start to finish on this webserver project and intend to print a book with a step by step...but only for centos. Eventually make it one big wiki site too.
Thanks for everyone who helped, everyone who yelled, everyone who flamed, everyone who just laughed, and everyone who supported.
Today, I am free from hosting companies! Hooooo- Aaaaaaaah!!!!
And a big thank you to the team at Centos who take the time to package up the redhat binaries and make them work correctly...and for adding the updates so quickly to the mirrors. I hope my book will bring more people to centos as a perfect solution for a webserver.
Gonna go to bed now...finally over.