Project Ulterius - Moving to VPS
Posted: Mon 21 May 2012 2:16 am
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.
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.