Virtual Private Servers
I was reading this article at Ars Technica the other day, and it piqued my interest in setting one of these up for myself. While I have quite a few servers running at home (four Linux servers, plus another embedded Linux system as a firewall), I hate relying on a cable modem connection for my e-mail, web serving, et cetera. I had looked into a few of these services in the past, but they were generally a bit too much money for a relatively trivial usage (I want my e-mail and web servers to be reliable, but they’re not so critical I wanted to spend over $50/month for a dedicated server, virtualized or not).
After reading the article, I took at Linode and was very impressed (not to mention I think Xen is the best pure hypervisor on the market today). I signed up for an account just a few minutes after reading through the site, and within minutes, my new “server” was up-and-running. Within a hour or two, I had it as my primary MX record on my domains, set to accept mail, scan it with ClamAV, and relay it to my internal mail server as long as it was up (and obviously to queue the mail if it’s down).
There’s a few other things I can think of to use this for. I’m definitely thinking of moving my web server to this guy. It’d be a good playground for OpenVPN too. And all in all, it’s definitely cheaper than buying a decent server (RAID, redundant power supplies) and colocating it (another idea I was toying with, but I was too cheap to do it).
