Recently we moved a shared hosting site from Verio to Bluehost.  I don’t recommend shared hosting if you are having security issues.  Please refer to my earlier posts on DDOS attacks.

Verio, at least for some of their customers, use FreeBSD and Bluehost uses Linux, most specifically a version of Ubuntu.  It looks like 10.04.4 LTS Lucid.This wasn’t a particularly hard migration just a couple of different ways that a Linux site treats shared hosting relative to FreeBSD.

FreeBSD uses jails which is an enhanced version of chroot.  Some of the features of jails are:

a) When Apache spawns a process I (or my FreeBSD login user) own this process.

b) On a FreeBSD system when I do an ifconfig -a , I only see my own ip address.  Not all the other ip addresses that are  bound to the NICs.

When logging into a Linux shared hosting site, a pseudo-user , presumably apache owns all the httpd processes.  I had to fix permissions on all the website files so that “other” can read all files and read and execute all directories.  (Thank Goodness for the “find” command.)  The other peculiarity is that you had use a web interface to create new mysql databases and database users.  A web interface , Really on a Linux system? I suspect that this is a limitation of non-chrooted shared hosting systems. It is annoying nonetheless.

None of these are show stoppers. Just something to be aware of.