Last week, my trusty old server recently went down, or more correctly, the internet connection it resides on, for a pretty prolonged period of time. Shouldn't really be a big surprise, and some might say that it was a miracle something hadn't gone majorly wrong earlier, as hosting anything out of your home internet connection is an inherently wonky model.
Alas, for the last 5 or so years, my home server (though upgraded several times), and in part, my more or less stable internet connection, has housed anything I could throw at it. Mostly this has been used for ssh-connections, file/svn/git-hosting, and for the last couple of years, mail.
As I said, it's a wonder it has worked as good as it has, but the moment I found out my server would be without connection for the better part of the week, it was time to reconsider some proper hosting. I've been considering a virtual private server for some time, and lately, I've heard a lot of good things (as well as it having a good price point) about Linode (shameless referral plug!).
After an hour or so from signing up, Trommelyd was running properly in a freshly installed Apache at a freshly set up Ubuntu install (seriously! <5 minutes from I decided to go for it to I sat there in root login!). A couple or so hours later, the first DNS-propagations started to hit DNS-servers, and the site started looking alive again, I started seeing hits in the logs, and my all my internet related worries started to fade away...
Anyways... What have I learned from all this?
- Backup? Yes! I used it! While my home server was without internet, my off site backup was all and well and was willing to copy over all I needed to bring the site back up.
- Norwegian Post's effectiveness? Not so much. I'm still waiting on a callback as to why my VDSL modem was never delivered at time. Bah...
- VPS, worth it? YES! Just on how streamlined the process was for setting the server up, the price point, what I have seen from hardware capabilities this far, I'm not looking back.
