The combination of svn for source control and Ant for managing your builds is hard to beat, but how do you handle builds that need to include templates being edited by designers or files being uploaded by end users of a cms?

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Currently we use Thawte SSL123's for our e-commerce clients, but we are just finding it is just more trouble than it should be getting the certificates issues and/or re-issued. We're looking for an SSL provider with good browser support (we don't want to have to mess with certificate chaining), a simple API that would allow us to script the entire provisioning process so we could allow clients to enter their data, could write a script to gen the csr and could automatically apply for and install the SSL without manual intervention. Anyone got any suggestions?

One of the biggest trends over the last couple of years has been the widespread adoption of virtualization solutions like VM Ware and Virtuozzo by hosting companies. We're now trying to decide whether to implement virtualization for our hosting needs . . .

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The next question we're considering as part of upgrading our hosting infrastructure is what web server to use - IIS or Apache . . .

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I'm certainly no Linux guru, but we need to choose a Linux distro for our web servers. Here were the considerations we made and the solution we chose . . .

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One of the first questions we're asking ourselves is what OS to use going forwards for our web servers. To date we've been a Windows only shop as we had no Linux hosting experience/resources. We've now found a great person to help with hosting consulting and are considering the pro's and cons of moving from Windows Server 2003 to some variant of Linux. For most people, Windows vs. Linux is a religious rather than an engineering decision. For us, it's just a matter of balancing the risks . . .

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As part of a series about upgrading the hosting environment at my day job, I was just thinking about home lame most terminal packages are for casual users . . .

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