APM: Q from APM last night..."How to run a personal site w/o hosting?"

[apthorpe+pm at cynistar.net]

Michael Reddick wrote:
> On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 7:56 AM, <jameschoate at austin.rr.com> wrote:
> 
>> This came up at last nights meeting of the Austin Perl
>> Mongers...how to run a site (eg something.com or
>> something_else.org) without using a hosting service or
>> paying commercial fees.
>>
> If you want a cheap solution with guaranteed uptime on the connection and
> with the versatility of doing whatever you want with the box, you can get a
> VPS. I use linode.com.  It's only $20/month for their cheapest setup which
> is more than enough for most people. I've been very happy with it.  You can
> literally have it setup in 30 minutes. And it's an easy way to learn
> sysadmin skills. I use Amazon's S3 to store encrypted backups using
> duplicity. That costs about 15 cents a month.

I'll second the recommendation of linode.com. For a number of years I
hosted websites, DNS, mail, Jabber, etc. off an AT&T DSL line (static
IPs, delegated rDNS) and began migrating stuff to a linode virtual back
in November when I moved from Austin to Chicago. My only complaint is
there's no easy way to back up the virtual for porting to a new data
center, or to save the VM locally but it was easy enough to set it up to
use the rdiff-backup solution I'm currently backing up with.

The big win for me was hardware abstraction; the improved outbound
bandwidth and fast reboot were nice but not as cool as not worrying
about hardware failure.

I highly recommend getting one's hands dirty with system administration.
 It recently helped with a PC disk upgrade - boot with a Knoppix live
CD, a long-running dd command to duplicate the old internal drive to an
external drive, shutdown, swap disks, and reboot. You learn a lot, but
it takes patience and a willingness to break stuff and reinstall.

"...twisty little commands, all alike..."

-- Bob