Entries tagged 'hosting'

I was checking out the “zero-emission web hosting” providers listed at Get Green Hosting and noticed that IONOS (formerly known as 1&1) has a $2/month virtual private server (VPS) plan that should be totally adequate to run this website. So I spent a couple of hours setting one up, and now this is it.

The only hassle in getting the server set up is I had to reboot to make sure the IPv6 address I added was correctly being used by the VPS and my container setup, and I had to set up a swap file so it wouldn’t go into a tailspin when I tried to do too much.

It looks like the server is located at their datacenter in New Jersey, but I’m not actually sure.

I have been with Linode for just over 17 years, but I haven’t felt the same loyalty since they were acquired by Akamai, which has always seemed like a pretty soulless corporation.

This probably isn’t really a move that pays off in any meaningful way (getting that hosting bill down to $24/year instead of $60/year), but it was an interesting exercise. Looks like Akamai isn’t on 100% renewable energy yet, except for their Seattle datacenter, so this is an improvement on that front.

I have been working on shutting down some of the (virtual) servers that we used for the store and other things. There were three: one for the store’s website, one for some WordPress sites/blogs, and one for this site.

The server hosting the store was the most expensive one, but now the site has been reduced to just a couple of static pages, I set those up to run off Bunny.net (that’s a referral link). That should cost a few pennies per months, so the $40 credit I have should cover that indefinitely.

I haven’t figured out what to do with the WordPress blogs, but none of them are active and I’ll probably just turn them into static sites and host them on Bunny.net, too.

The last thing is this server which could be a static site but I like tinkering my little blog engine and think I want to keep it dynamic. I may move the hosting over to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) because they offer some “always” free services that would be more than adequate. I have been really curious to play with their Arm-based compute servers but there has been no availability in the region I picked when signing up.

I need to decide how I want to set up the server on OCI to run this. I’m currently using a pretty simple docker-compose.yml setup to handle running a php-fpm container, a MySQL database server, and Sphinx, with the system nginx fronting things. I already know I want to replace Sphinx, and I think I want to try using Caddy on the front. I guess if I really wanted to be extra and take advantage of the free resources from Oracle that I’d spin up an Autonomous Database instead of using MySQL.

Between credits I have with Bunny.net and Oracle’s free offering, I’ll be paying almost nothing for hosting all of this except for the domain name renewals. That soothes my cheapskate soul.

i finally decided to take the plunge and signed up for a virtual server at linode.com that will replace my current server colocated at a local colo facility. the host i was assigned to is in dallas. i’m a little bummed that my sites will no longer actually be hosted in los angeles, but the savings were just too tempting.

if you are looking for a 1u server that is a p4/2.4GHz with 768MB of RAM and 55GB of disk space, let me know. i’ll have one available for sale in not too long. 1055 days of uptime right now. it is no powerhouse, but maybe it would be good as a firewall or monitoring machine.

nothing important has actually been moved over yet. i’ve been getting some of the basic services up and running, and moved over some more obscure sites just to make sure i’m not doing anything stupid.

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.