Shiny New VPS

[Peter Knight]

Happy Friday everyone!

Picked up a new VPS subscription last month after using shared servers for years. Feels great having a space I almost completely manage myself thats not shared etc.

What are you guys running your client and business sites on at the moment and are you doing anything cool with it? Probably some of your are on dedicated or even hosting in-house?

Generally interested in HDDs, storage, hosting etc so I'm just curious.

[pwired]

doing anything cool

Renting a corner in a basement in an area where they have internet over fibre optics

100 down and 50 up. Want to setup my own linux box server that I can manage from

home where I only have 6 down and 500 kb up.

[Joss]

@pwired

What do you do about things like power backup or maintenance if you away (or asleep) and so on?

Those things have always put me off having a home server except for development.

[pwired]

@Joss, I took the advice of Diogo and not put client websites on it.

I put owncloud on it and a few sites of my own, the whole thing is

actually for me to learn new things.

[Joss]

Oh, okay! 

Yes, I did similar several years ago, but we were having too many problems with power outages at the time - I gave up. Now I just have a little dev server by my desk running ubuntu and webmin/virtualmin. 

[pwired]

Here is more shiny stuff, you guys know it ?

http://anydesk.com/remote-desktop

[Peter Knight]

@pwired - that sounds cool. When you say "linux box server", whats the enclosure / hawrdware actually look like? is it a rack server or an NAS?

I'd love to serve sites myself from the home office but like Joss, UPS (uninterupted power supply) and the likes put me off.

[Pete]

VPN for me for some years now with a Web host.

Have got a 4 bay Synology that I've burned all my DVDs to (finally legal to make backups in the UK) but also it is configured to download backups from the VPS overnight. It can also be run as a Web server but I've always just used WAMP (found it better than XAMPP) on my local machine for development.

[pwired]

whats the enclosure / hawrdware actually look like? is it a rack server or an NAS? I'd love to serve sites myself from the home office but like Joss, UPS (uninterupted power supply) and the likes put me off.

Linux version antiX-13.2 (fast) with Lamp and Zimbra

No special hardware like a rack server or nas, just and old box where I have put

my own motherboard ASRock Z87 with intel i5 and 8G ram. Instead of UPS I use a

12V car battery with a converter to 220 V ac. It's all placed in a basement so there

are no cooling problems. I don't have to pay for electricity or something. The only

thing I pay is that I share with them their monthly internet bill. I certainly am curious

what will be the downtime during a year. I want to see if the whole thing will be useful

to script automate making backups, pings, check webshop email workings, etc.

Will free up time to do other things. 

[Joss]

I am sure this thread should actually be called "I've got a brand new pair of roller skates."

(Apart from a nice fit, deal old Melanie really does have the most incredible brown eyes. My bother took me to see her play at the Glastonbury Fair when I was young and I was totally besotted!)

[Peter Knight]

@Pete

How do you find the Synology? I'm hoping to sell my QNAP 209 for the Synology Slim or Air. They get great reviews.

[Peter Knight]

Here is more shiny stuff, you guys know it ?

http://anydesk.com/remote-desktop

I hadn't heard of it before. Are these things still useful now that so much is in the cloud?

[Pete]

@Pete

How do you find the Synology? I'm hoping to sell my QNAP 209 for the Synology Slim or Air. They get great reviews.

I'm on a DS412+ with 3x 4TB WD RED drives in it. A little annoyed that WD RED are now 6TB and I could have more space if I buy some of those, but whilst I've still got one bay spare and a lot of space left in this RAID configuration I have no need to upgrade - I just like the idea of having even more space

I've not really tried to run it as a server but I'm sure it could, albeit a bit underpowered. What I'd really like to see is one of their smaller units with a punchier CPU and more RAM.

That said, it's good enough to stream movies to a smart TV using PLEX (worth a look for those with media collections) without transcoding or buffering - even with large blu-ray files, though it will depend on your TV's ability to read MKV files or other similar uncompressed formats (I know that's not their technical term, but a good way to describe them).

I hadn't heard of it before. Are these things still useful now that so much is in the cloud?

I use TeamViewer quite a bit which is similar. Helpful for diagnosing issues customers run into like email config issues or those times when a customercan see an issue but you can't replicate it. TeamViewer also lets you keep contact lists so you don't have to remember the login details every time - just prompt the customer to let you on to their machine and you're away. (I said "customer" instead of "client" there to avoid confusion with software clients ).

I have also, on occasion, used it on a laptop when I needed to check something on my PC at home, though that only works if my wife turns the PC on since I always shut it down. You can set that up for unattended access via a password so on the off-chance you did leave the PC on it's just a few clicks away from wherever you are.

But yes, with cloud storage there isn't usually much need. With web access to your Synology also a possibility it's like having your very own Google drive but without Google

[LostKobrakai]

@Pete

How do you find the Synology? I'm hoping to sell my QNAP 209 for the Synology Slim or Air. They get great reviews.

I have an older DS212j and I can agree with Pete, they would be really nice small serverboxes, but the cpu and ram aren't fit to do so. I use mine just for backups and a local dns / dhcp server, to be able to view local pages all over the network.

[OrganizedFellow]

Recently made the switch to DigitalOcean from shared hosting for years.

I'm still super newb at it, but have learned to install LAMP + git, secured SSH and MySQL, created a couple VirtualHosts, git clone ProcessWire and setup, so far I've been pushing my home dev git repo.

I don't know a thing about bash scripting, but one I get started, I'll probably end up writing one out, because so far I have had to duplicate these steps a couple times to get them running the way I want (workflow issues).

[Peter Knight]

For the synology fans out there, the new DS415+ has much better specs. Better CPU and a healthy amount of RAM.

https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/DS415+

I'm sorely tempted to Amazon uk one over here but the Euro to GBP conversion isn't great right now. Still I've added and removed it from my basket about 10 times this week. Must be driving their analytics and cart usability analysts nuts.

[Pete]

For the synology fans out there, the new DS415+ has much better specs. Better CPU and a healthy amount of RAM.

https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/DS415+

Would happily sell someone my 412+ and upgrade - the only thing the 412+ is a little slow on sometimes is streaming via Plex but it's capable other than that. The 415+ has double the CPU and RAM so that could make all the difference.

[Peter Knight]

I caved and ordered that DS415+. Ouch but YAY.

Can't wait to try it.

Love Plex too btw.