Questions[slicehost](server)

I see that there are lots of VPS/cloud questions, but they all seem geared towards choosing for a new project - I'm interested in switching teams.

For the last 18 months or so, I've been very happy with Slicehost. (In fact: I recommend them.) But as demand has grown, I've increasingly been having memory issues and have had to do emergency hard resets on more than one occasion. One option would be to resize the slice again, but demand seems to come in bursts, so it seems wasteful to pay all that extra money for extra memory that isn't needed most of the time. For that reason, I've been looking into Amazon's EC2.

Has anyone made a similar transition? What should I watch out for? Is it even a good idea?

Specifics: The organisation is a community radio station. The server instance runs Apache (which hosts wordpress, mediawiki and phpBB installations) and Icecast ('pimped' with Liquidsoap).

I have a LAMP box running Ubuntu, Apache 2 and PHP5 with Slicehost. I'm a bit new to all this sysadmin stuff (I'm primarily a web developer).

I need to use the IMAP functions in PHP, but they don't seem to be enabled according to phpinfo(). How do I enable them?

All of the information I can find on the net says I need to recompile PHP to add it, but I don't have a clue how to do that.

Any advice would be most appreciated. Thanks.

I am trying to decide whether OTP (Wikid) or Ssh Keys would be practically more secure in the following scenarios :

Option 1 - Wikid OTP : 3 Servers @ Slicehost; shared private network over which radius auth traffic passes. Hosts firewalled accordingly so that only my servers can talk to radius server. Assuming the Xen host (slicehost) is not compromised and their private network is trustworthy no other guests should be able to tamper with my radius traffic providing a reasonably (as per cost) secure & flexible setup

Option 2 - Good 'ol Ssh keys : 3 servers @ slicehost; No shared private network between the servers. I create ssh keys protected by a strong password. Simple and effective, providing my laptop is not compromised.

What are the Pros / Cons with associated solutions ?

I have an ubuntu slice at slicehost, which means it is a DomU on a Xen host - and it's a pretty stripped down installation.

The thing that bugs me is that scrolling back in the terminal using shift-pgup doesn't work.

Can anybody tell me what package enables this scrollback functionality (so I can check if it is installed) - or if you have any other insights into why it might not be working, let me know.

(note: I am currently running screen with "defscrollback 1024" set, but it still doesn't work)

I have an Ubuntu 7.10 slice on Slicehost running my main web server. I want to update to Ubuntu 8.10 because the repositories are gone for 7.10 and I want the latest security and application upgrades.

Slicehost does not seem to let me dist-upgrade from 7.10 to 8.10, they suggested I buy a new VPS slice, upgrade it to what I need, port my data over, and then reimage my original slice from the 2nd slice. Has anyone else done this? Any better way to do it or pitfalls to watch out for while doing this? How long will my site be down if I use this method? Can I finish it in 2 hours on a Saturday?