Which is the most appropriate way to host multiple websites in linode?

Question

I just purchased the basic linode package and I am wondering what to do next. I have 5 websites with light traffic hosted on multiple providers and I want to host them all in linode. The question is:

Should I host all the websites in separate folders in a main linode of 20Gb and use virtualhosts to forward them from different domains, or create a linode for each website? I can understand that much space is lost when you create multiple linodes because you copy linux system files over and over again (and swap space). In the other hand, If a website is attacked or fails, the other ones are kept intact.

Answer 1

I have the same situation, and the short answer is that I recommend one linode and use virtual hosting at the webserver level to handle the traffic.

I have 6 websites running on my Linode right now (and have for the past 5 years), 4 are Ruby / Rack apps, one PHP app, and one plain, static HTML app. Because the rack apps each run a different application instance, if one fails, the others stay alive.

The bigger concern for me is memory / swapping because of either higher than expected traffic volume or memory leaks. I recommend installing monit, and configuring it to restart processes if memory issues arise.