Tue, 20 Jun 2006

Debian Virtual Private Server

I got a new virtual private server (vps) from a company called TekTonic today. I've been meaning to replace the Pentium MMX 200 that hosted this blog and my email for a long time. The virtual server is running within Virtuozzo, a commercial virtualization product, though the underlying technology is also available as the open source OpenVZ.

For $8 per month, I've got a virtual server running on a Dual AMD Opteron 246 with 128MB of RAM, 5GB of disk space, and 512kbps out (with unmetered inbound traffic). Since I had been running on an old piece of crap, I've already got everything set up to run fine within a small amount of memory. Apache is server mostly static pages from blosxom; Postman is my lightweight webmail application for the rare occassion when I need it; visitors for web stats; uw-imapd and exim (though I am using the heavy build with exiscan-acl) for mail; and the good old jabberd in case I ever find someone who uses jabber/xmpp. If I were running a database or some java application server, I'd need more ram.

The bandwidth is capped by the virtualization software which means you can't spike, but it also means no overage charges. TekTonic charges $50/month for an additional megabit which is pretty good.

They offer CentOS 4, Fedora Core 4, Suse 10.0, and Debian 3.1, and they had my Debian server provisioned in about 10 minutes.

I've only been running on the new server for about 7 hours, but so far, I'm very impressed. If you're reading this, the server is still up, so that's good.

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The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else. - Frederic Bastiat