I'm renting a tiny Linode to mess around with, host my site and learn more about Linux. It's a VPS with 512MB of RAM and 16GB of storage.
I've never owned a computer that wasn't sitting in front of me before, so I've got some questions:
I've got Apache and MySQL running. Do I need to leave a certain amount of memory free?
total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 498 382 116 0 41 185 -/+ buffers/cache: 154 343 Swap: 255 13 242
What kind of CPU usage would you call excessive?
I know if this was my laptop, it'd be odd to have the CPU running at 100% constantly and 95% of memory in use. Does the same apply here?
And I know I'm nowhere near there yet, but... at what point would you buy, for example, a dedicated DB server? How do I know when this server doesn't cut it anymore?