So last month, I finally got myself a VPS through Slicehost and decided it was time to start doing my own personal Drupal stuff. The experience has been mostly positive; building the virtual box from scratch, prepping a multisite environment, doing some light theming, etc.

Couple of snafu's yesterday, though. Apparently, there is a bug in the latest version of Views that requires your environment to have a TON of memory available for PHP. Did not know this and TOTALLY hosed the database. Everything go screwed up.... So I basically had to rebuild the site from scratch and lost a bunch of posts.

Which brings me to an important lesson: ALWAYS make backups. I set my cron script to make a back up for every half hour, which is probably overkill, and will have to change later when the db's get bigger, but saved for now. I will be enhancing backups later on; creating a script that backs up files as well as db and stores them offsite (also, SliceHost offers a backup service that I may take advantage of...)

Also want to start developing locally, then pushing to the host, and creating a staging/production environment as well.