I've been working up a cfengine-based setup to manage a new server infrastructure. This will be my third cfengine-based infrastructure, so I should have learned enough to make a cleaner, tighter configuration. Unfortunately I'm still finding cfengine to be too damned awkward.

So, I'd like to put together a list of alternatives to cfengine. I'll add them to this page, and hopefully add on notes and reviews as I learn more. If you have experience with these or others, please add a comment.

• Puppet seems to be an up and comer. It looks to be designed to be much more extensible than cfengine is. It also lets you make sure each host only sees its own configuration, which is one of my peeves about cfengine. It's my leading candidate at the moment.

There are scads of DNS providers out there. Hosting providers almost always provide DNS service as well, but I prefer to have a separate provider, so it's easier to switch hosting.

My favorite DNS service is easyDNS. They have a pretty comprehensive service, and they now do .co.uk domains, although you can't use their web-based interface to do it. There are cheaper services, but Easy DNS are by no means a rip off. The UI is clean and easy to use, their service is rock-solid and fast. I also find them to be a straight-shooting type of company, they don't use dodgy practices to squeeze extra money out of you.

Here are some of the hosting providers I've worked with.

DreamHost

DreamHost offers shared hosting accounts with an amazing amount of functionality for a very low price. Lots of virtual domains, mysql instances, and tons of extras. They also have dedicated servers, but they seem to be in flux. When I looked at them a while ago they had dedicated Debian servers for under $100 per month, but these are now "coming soon", and the pricing for dedicated RedHat servers (as opposed to VPS servers) aren't promising. So I'm not sure if their dedicated servers are as great a value as their shared hosting.

I would call cfengine a configuration management tool. I just can't get into graphical and web-based tools for managing servers, I much prefer having a set of configuration files that I can check into version control. Once I've got a decent configuration set for an infrastructure, setting up, updating, or changing the role of a machine is a simple matter of tweaking the configuration files and running a command.

I find cfengine to be a bit awkward, it's configuration system suffers from being an academic research project. But so far I haven't found anything better.

Here are some of the standard tools I use for managing multi-server hosting infrastructures.

This section has links and reviews of useful resources for managing hosting infrastructures. This includes sites, tools, books, and vendors.