Recently in Linux Category

I moved this weblog and my personal email out of the closet and onto a virtual private server last summer.  After looking around, I picked RapidVPS as a hosting provider.  They had good reviews and reasonably priced service.

After I moved, I was quite happy with the performance of my server, but increasingly unhappy with its reliability.  My server was sometimes down or hard to reach, and indeed it was in fact less reliable than it had been living on a Dell P3/550 in my closet.  When I contacted RapidVPS about the problems, they generally responded quickly, but the problems kept occurring.

In November I vented my frustration and sent a message to them.  I was "reluctantly unhappy," I told them. I got a response from Rick Blundell, the owner and chief tech person: what can I do to make you happier?  Make my service more reliable, please, I replied.

Today I just sent Rick another message thanking him.  For the last three months, my service has been everything I could want.  It just works.  No more slowdowns, no issues reaching it. It's been boring again, and that's just what you want out of infrastructure.

Doing server Infrastructure is hard work.  People only notice when it stops working.  When it works, they don't care.  I know; I've run server farms at CNN and EarthLink.  Problems happen. And sometimes fixing it can be difficult, frustrating, and expensive.

Rick and RapidVPS have made me a happy customer.  Thank you, guys. 

I've been hosting my email (@bluepenguin.us), my weblog, and a bunch of pictures on an old Dell P3 550 in the closet of my house for years.

No more; all that stuff is now on a virtual private server hosted by RapidVPS.  It looks like I have my own very own server, but in reality my server is running under OpenVZ on one RapidVPS's servers.  Timesharing returns!

The old Dell in the closet https://www.rapidvps.com/worked reasonably well.  The biggest hassle I'had came a few years back when Bellsouth started blocking inbound port 25; when they did that, I couldn't receive email directly.  To get around that, DynDNS's MailHop relay service. MailHop relay received email my domain, and then contacted my home server on an open port and delivered the mail.

MailHop worked well.  It also had the benefit that if my home server went off the air, my mail would not bounce; MailHop would keep gathering the mail until my home server was back up again.

The one thing I did not like was the cost.  MailHop relay is $40/year per domain, and I have two domains. 

I'm been thinking about moving to a VPS for a while, but the cost stopped me. VPS services seemed to be at least $30 a month.

My VPS costs me $10 a month.  For that, I get 5 gig of hard drive space, 10 gigabytes network bandwidth, 128mb of RAM, and 100mhz of processor.  I actually pay $13/month - I bought 3 more gig of disk space at $1/month, so I have 8 gig available to me.  I have a choice of Linux distributions - I'm running CentOS 3. RapidVPS increased their price to $15/month on this service in Sep '08.  Still a good deal, I think.)  

A couple of those spec numbers - 128mb memory, 100mhz processor - gave me pause.  My P3 dell was a 550mhz box with 256mb of ram.  However, the specs from RapidVPS are minimums.  I'm only guaranteed 100mhz of a processor, but if the physical server isn't busy, I can burst up to 3 Ghz.  Same with memory: I'm only guaranteed 128mb of RAM, but I can burst up to a couple of gig if I need it.

In practice, it works great.  When I fire up Movable Type, type in a new entry, and then rebuild my index files, the build happens much faster on my VPS server than on my Dell.  I need that extra CPU for a few seconds, but then I'm done.

Other wins from running on a VPS:

• The disks underlying my VPS are running under RAID, so I'm much better protected against hardware failures.
  
• My VPS itself is backed up; if the physical server at RapidVPS goes down, they can restore my server from a backup and have it back on the air quickly.
• My network connectivity is far better.  My Dell was running behind a home DSL service - 3mbit/s down, at most 384kb up.  And of course this frees up bandwidth on my home connection, too.

I've read good things about RapidVPS, and so far I've been impressed.  My server was up in a couple of minutes after signing up.  Today I was uploading lots of data and ran out of space; RapidVPS automatically gave me more space and encouraged me to either purchase addition space (I did) or delete files.