A New Virtual Server to Play With

Tuesday, 5th April 2016

After a couple of weekends with significant down time on my web sites, I decided to move hosts.  Until now I've been happily using very cheap shared hosting from ProserveUK, who despite the low price have given me better service than my more expensive previous hosts.

While I'm sure that ProserveUK will sort out their current problems, the downtime of my sites was the push I needed to do something I've wanted to do for some time: move to a server of my own.  The price of a full server is still more than I can spare, so I've decided to go down the Virtual Server route.  My sites don't get enough traffic to need high performance, and a Virtual Server gives me the amount of control I want.

A while ago I bookmarked Mythic Beasts, probably because they host the Raspberry Pi web site and their services looked interesting.  So I ordered a virtual server from them over the weekend.  Now I've got it set up with Debian, copied this web site across to it and am waiting for a DNS change to propogate, so you can all (both?) look at the results.

Though the job of setting this thing up is more akin to what I've already done on my development server at home, there's a lot more work than I imagined.  For a start, I'll have to set up a proper mail server with POP3 and IMAP support, which is something I've not done for about sixteen years.  So I might start up a separate blog page just to log my sysadmin problems, solutions, and rants.