going virtual

along with re-thinking how i back things up, i have also been thinking about how to handle hosting my stuff. currently i have a server in a colocation facility that is costing me $75/month. it is a p4/2.4GHz with 768MB of RAM and 55GB of disk space, of which i’m only using about 20GB. the machine is over four years old now, so i am starting to get the creepy feeling that it is running on borrowed time.

for $30/month, paid annually, i could get a virtual server from linode with 384MB of RAM and 18GB of disk. it is half as much memory and even less disk space, but it doesn’t look like the memory will be an issue based on my current usage. i can use less disk-space by archiving things off to other places like amazon’s s3, such as the access logs for this site that go back to 1997.

there are other virtual server providers, of course, but jeff waugh’s praise of linode is what got me started on looking into this again. they look like they have their act together, based on the activity in their forums and how they present themselves in general. so many of the other providers seem so dodgy.

of course, if i do move to a virtual server, i’ll have to figure out what to do with the physical server that i pull out of the colo facility.