Project Ulterius - Moving to VPS

[TNETWeather]

Project Ulterius... (farther, more advanced, more remote)

For years I had my own servers in my Home Office data center. The costs of Electricity, Cooling and Noise made me reconsider what I was doing and look for alternatives.

About 6 months ago, I started looking at remote data centers dedicated boxes, VPS and whatnot and 3 weeks ago, I purchased a VPS package. In less than 3 weeks, I built, tested and then migrated all of my locally hosted Internet services (Web, Email, Mailing List, Email Processing, Weather, Clients etc...) over to the VPS. A week ago last Sunday, I turned off my servers at 8pm and they have not been turned back on since. Actual build and move time was about 5 day since I had full work weeks during that time.

I picked a middle of the road package for around $40 a month which has 1gb ram, 40gb storage and 400gb of transfers a month. Initially, I wasn't sure that all I had would fit, but the biggest concern RAM has turned out not to be an issue and disk space is sitting just under 50%. I still have a lot of stuff that I could archive.

I picked Debian 6 Stable for the OS which so far has been a good choice. I've only had some very minor issues with any of the packages.

Speed has been great and connectivity much much better than I expected especially with the weather stuff. I am avg around 40ms between my Home office and the server and the worst I've seen from a client is in the mid 70's. Before, I had some clients with 180ms and more.

The VPS give me a lot of flexibility... I can for example purchase a second one, clone the first, do a radical upgrade to the box, then turn off he first, switch IP's between the nodes and bring up the new one as th primary. After everything is checked out, discontinue the old one and only pay for the time I used the 2nd node. In the past, I've had to have a second server onsite with similar capabilities to do that.

At my home office, I still have a number of workstations, but I am going to consolidate those shortly, and I have a 6TB NAS which I can access from the remote VPS for archive and storage.

My office is a lot cooler. In the past it was not uncommon to push 90F during the heat months and required the AC to run most of the time. Now it is avg under 84F and the AC is hardly running other than to cool the rest of the house like normal. Will be interesting to see what the bill looks like next time round. We have been avg 10% to 15% less this year over last so far and it is going to drop quite a bit from now on compared to previous years.

The only real problem I've had was self-caused when I started messing around with SPF records and IPv6... but that is another story.

[mcrossley]

Interesting Kevin, I couldn't justify VPS myself, and moving back to hosted service would mean re-working quite a bit of how I now operate my weather web site - too much local file copying going on.

Q. How do you determine which hosting companies are happy with continual FTP/SSH uploads? I did think about trying to write some PHP upload scripts and see if they could be made to work better/reliably.

[TNETWeather]

Interesting Kevin, I couldn't justify VPS myself, and moving back to hosted service would mean re-working quite a bit of how I now operate my weather web site - too much local file copying going on.

That was a concern though I don't do any local copying. All data collected on the Weather Workstation was sent to the local server via a SFTP using the internal IP network. Moving it to the VPS however has not been an issue.

I also have data collecting from multiple weather collectors. Weather-Display, Cumulus and a couple custom ones that I wrote in Perl. The server itself collects even more data on its own.

Q. How do you determine which hosting companies are happy with continual FTP/SSH uploads? I did think about trying to write some PHP upload scripts and see if they could be made to work better/reliably.

I only send data and a few images over the wire to the server though. No web pages. I have PHP pre-procesing or dynamic processing to display the website stuff. I also have a bunch of Perl and some increasing Python scripts as well as PHP CLI.

Just checked my Logwatch stats for yesterday. Weather SFTP connections: 14,749 - GRLevel3 Connections: 888

Most hosting companies don't have a lot of problems with ftp transfers. The issue was more the processing that I was doing on the UNIX site.

Example, way back I setup an account with Hostgator for my WX-Host dynamic weather icons. The problem was they kept turning off my crontab which cycled the Perl scripts that did the actual generation. After a few go arounds with that, I had no choice but to move it back onsite.

There is a bigger difference between a VPS and just a hosted account as you get to manage the server in the VPS. You can control the CPU, Memory and storage.

They have some VPS packages that start at $19 a month.