I've been running my own server for a year and a half now, and have been surprised at how trouble free it's been. I attribute this to: luck good planning a decent upstream provider the maturity of linux distribution maintenance tools (e.g. yum) In this case, good planning means: keeping it as simple as possible doing things one at a time i'm the only one mucking about on it And so this month, inspired by some Drupal camp sessions, I decided to take some time to make a good thing better. My goals were: Optimizing my web servicing for more traffic. Simplifying my Drupal maintenance. Automating my backups. And here's the results ... Web Servicing Optimizations This was relatively easy - I just finished off the work from here: http://homeofficekernel.blogspot.com/2008/02/drupal-centos-optimization.html Specifically, i discovered that I hadn't actually setup a mysql query cache, so I did that. And then I discovered that it was pretty easy an...