OpenSolaris is just another Unix variant. Sun machines are still very good server hardware, although OpenSolaris also runs on x86 hardware. It is very similar to Linux; in fact I once helped a top-of-the-field $150.00/hour Solaris admin set up a Linux box, and he was shocked at how much like Solaris Linux is.
nginx is the latest, greatest minimal web server that looks really good for memory usage; important for resource-limited situations like shared hosting or virtual private servers with memory limits.
I originally had the cheapest VPS that entic.net offered ($15/month at the time) but when I ended up hosting two other active sites besides mine I ran into memory limits when working in the Manager on my own site, and had to pay more to upgrade to the next level to get more memory allocated. If I had been running nginx, I don’t think I would have needed that upgrade. So I’m going to get another VPS, the cheapest one they have, hopefully on the same physical server, and get nginx running with PHP as fastCGI and suexec. Once I know how to do it, I’ll take the sites down on the other server for the hour or so that I expect it to take to do the job (when one knows what one is doing!). Then I’ll be able to host a couple more active sites on it. I’ve got more than plenty of disk space and bandwidth allocated. It’s just that Apache is a memory hog.
On a side note, I ran across Entic’s VPS servers because they also host a
free LDAP server and I was playing around with PHP’s LDAP functions. When I saw they were using Solaris, I just had to give it a try!