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by Christian Neukirchen.
Original Post: Getting root
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So with the decision to move made, there were a few things to sort out:
Where to go to
What OS to run
How best to get everything set up
How to handle backups
So it was research time!
Choosing a provider
Happily several people had just made the same kind of move, so I got some good advice. It boiled down to a choice between RimU and Quantact. I ended up deciding on Quantact, they were slightly cheaper, the main guy seemed nice on irc and, to be honest “rim-u” made me laugh every time I said or thought the name. I’m currently using their basic service, 96Mb of RAM, 4500Mb of disk and 40Gb/month data transfer. It’s only costing me a few dollars more per month than TextDrive, and they’ve proved to be very solid over the past few weeks. My host has only been down for half an hour because of a RAID issue, and I got plenty of warning that was going to happen.
They use Xen for virtualization, and I’ve been really impressed with how it does it. I’m guaranteed memory and disk, no problems with lack of file descriptors etc. and the scheduler means that no one can hog all the processing power. It just seems a much better way of organising things.
OS and Setup
This was actually a really easy decision in the end, after I saw the excellent guide Ezra Zygmuntowicz wrote for setting up the Rails stack on Debian. He’s turning it into a book which I’m really looking forward too. Debian is a pretty small distro, meaning less space taken up by the OS, and less to back up. It doesn’t have the latest and greatest, which can occasionally be a pain but backports help with that.
I pretty much followed the guide to the letter and in no time had transferred my sites and pointed the DNS to their new home.
Backup
This is the one thing I knew I was going to miss from TextDrive, they have excellent backup there. I had a look at various backup solutions, but in the end decided that as they’d been so good before, TextDrive’s Strongspace would be the best solution. They have a 4Gb package which is a perfect fit, as I’m not planning on using up anywhere near my 4500Mb on Quantact. After much reading around about what was important to back up and not I ended up with my own Ruby based solution using Rake and FileUtils. With that in the crontab I’m much happier. One of the next things on my sysadmin list is actually restoring that backup somewhere else as no backup strategy can be considered working until you’ve restored onto a new system and got everything going again!
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