The Blog of Harald

With rogers.com blocking SMTP in both directions, I needed an offsite backup for persephone.cfrq.net and related e-mail.

I’ve opened a tektonic.net “Virtual Private Server” account. $8/month gets me 128M of memory and 5Gb of disk space. It’s a very strange measurement, though, because the server hosts (running “Virtuozzo”:http://www.swsoft.com/en/products/virtuozzo/) do all sorts of dynamic stuff that reduces my usage. For example, the OS binaries all appear to be linked to “master” copies outside of my VPS, so they don’t count against my quota. Memory management is also strange. The data reported by “top” doesn’t match “free”; my current guess is that virtual memory is handled by the host OS, and any pages in my processes that are swapped out don’t count against my quota.

Anyway, the net result is that I’m currently running a backup mailserver in about 500Mb of disk and 16Mb of “memory”, for $8USD/month. Nifty!

There were a couple of problems with reliability the first few days; apparently these were caused by the host server I was assigned to. After they migrated everyone off that machine to a new host, my virtual server has been solid. It’s running Debian Stable, and while I’d prefer Ubuntu Dapper, I’m not going to upgrade just yet; I’m still working on upgrading persephone, after all :-)