Into the world of Virtual Hosting
I’m entering into Virtual Hosting. Many of the pages and services I’ve run out of spare gear at FSG are now moved or moving to a virtual host. I chose VPSLink for their \$7/mo tiny server, then while moving my domain name pointers discovered that Gandi.net is starting a virtual hosting business with more RAM and disk for about the same price.
Living in a tiny slice of a virtual host is certainly different from living in a leftover 2GHz/1GB/500GB PC, fortunately I remember when 64M of RAM was huge so I think I’ll get by just fine.
- postfix/dovecot in TLS, lighttpd+fastcgi+php5 all fits nicely.
- TLS incurs a fair bit of RAM use.
- CPU use is odd. I don’t have visibility to know if I am CPU bound. I don’t think I am, but I can’t see from inside my Xen box.
- The machine is noticeably sluggish at things like an initial rsync backup offsite. Slow disk? Slow network? I’m not sure.
- The total annual bill will cost less than the electricity to keep a PC powered up. Happy Earth Day!
I guess if you find the site gone and just this at archive.org you’ll know I’ve had a virtual hosting disaster. I don’t foresee a problem. I don’t know what the hosting company does if a machine fails, but I keep a full backup every night in my closet so I’ll be ok.