Nginx runs all my Rails sites and will forever. If you haven't tried it yet, I can't say enough good things about it. It never breaks. It has just absurdly good memory consumption, which is clutch when you're trying to run your site on a memory heavy platform like Rails on a VPS which is very memory constrained.

(By comparison, Apache is quite the memory hog and I still haven't figured out how to say the magic words to get it to not effectively crash my blog and every other site on the server if I burst to 10,000 visitors in an hour. That is not supposed to be a big number. Apache has 500 MB to play with and still can't keep up.)

I also find, and this might just be a matter of taste, that the configuration makes more sense to me than Apache configuration does. This is funny because Apache configuration is obsessively well-documented and Nginx configuration is not.

Additionally, some easy-to-use features cover weak points in typical Rails (&etc) deployment scenarios. The big one for me is file serving, since my website is essentially one big PDF printing press. The simplest level (works for me, won't work for Facebook) is just having the file anywhere accessible on the disk and having the application put a special header on the response saying "Hey, Nginx: give them this path.", then terminating Rails' involvement. That frees up your Mongrel to start doing hard work again and greatly, greatly, GREATLY decreases the resources you need to stream your 5 MB PDF, 20 MB executable, etc to the user.

So it scales down, but does it scale up? Ooooooooh yeah. Impressively so. See the tales of Wordpress deployment, where not a whole lot of Nginx gets hit with a year's worth of my traffic every couple of seconds and still keeps on trucking.

No.

I've never had much interest in chemistry, but after reading this article, I found myself digging through the archives. And then I found myself thinking, "Chlorine Trifluoride is scary stuff! He says that's because it's a damned impressive oxidizing agent. What exactly does it mean to be an 'oxidizing agent' anyways? Hmm..." I'm now sorely tempted to spend the remainder of my day sifting through chemistry stuff online.

This is exactly the kind of writing that the scientific community needs. This is outreach and recruitment at its finest, and we could use a lot more of it. People ask, "How do we get kids interested in science?" Prof. Lowe's blog isn't the entire answer, but it's a hell of a good start.

Correction: As noted below, Dr. Lowe is not a professor. My error, but everything else still stands.

This needs repeating: there is no way for a VPS provider not to have access to the internals of your VM; it is unrealistic to have such an expectation.

It might not be unrealistic to expect them to ask before looking, but if your concern is "one bad apple" then you've already lost.

If this is advertising, I want more of it. As an SVN curmudgeon, the first part of this tutorial finally persuaded me that I really, really need to give distributed version control a fair trial. Joel pretty much nailed all my objections/complaints/whines about switching. But I also know the pain of merging all too well - a benefit that I hadn't really seen explained as persuasively before.

We've been using nginx at engine yard for 4 years now and I can say that it is the most solid peice of software out of the hundreds of open source componenets we run. We have close to 15k nginx dEmons running if not more last I counted and it accounts for 0.001% of production issues/problems.

Can't say enough good things about this peice of software. It just works and it's smoking fast and very resource friendly. Thumbs up all around

That's such a dishonest way of describing the situation that it's hard to believe it wasn't deliberate. You describe this bill as if it merely allowed powerful people to get their friends into the country, and it's not like that at all. Startup investors are not identical with the rich and connected. Angel investors are generally fairly rich, but not all VCs are. And they're not choosing people at random to bring into the country. They have to invest money in someone's startup to do that.