Welcome to xdeb.net, my own server :-).
I have been thinking about getting my own server for a long time. A server to play around with, test new stuff and host my own domains. With freedom comes responsibility. Your own server means you are responsible when the harddrive die, when a system upgrade goes wrong etc. This is the main reason why it has taken so long.
In the last couple of years virtualization technology has become commonplace and it works really well. Virtual private server, VPS, is one service that is available thanks to this. VPS means that you split a single physical server into multiple virtual servers.
VPS is perfect when shared hosting is to limited and you don’t want to go all the way to having your own server hardware. It was time for my to get a server.
I rent this VPS from VPSLink. They are responsible for the hardware and the Internet connection. I’m responsible for the software. VPSLink is a bare bone service made for experienced Linux users. The price is low but you need to know how to set upp your server from scratch and the customer support consist of a wiki and a forum.
I’m on there Link-4 plan so the server should be able to handle quite a lot. During testing it has worked well most of the time. The only problem is that on a few occasions my “neighbours” on this server has been hogging the CPU bringing the server down to a crawl. I will soon put one of my existing web sites here and we will see if it becomes a real problem.
Up until now I have uses shared hosting and it works well. It just that I want the kind of control you only can get with your own server. I will not move my customers to xdeb.net since I have zero interest in being responsible for there e-mail, web sites etc. People, or at least most of my customers, freak out if there e-mail stop working for more than five minuts :-).
On my VPS server I have installed Debian GNU/Linux 3.1, It’s the Linux distribution I’m used to and it tends to be rock solid. Apache, MySQL, PHP, Postfix, Courier, Mailman, RoundCube, OpenSSL, OpenSSH etc. are installed and configured. The part that took the longest to get right was e-mail. I wanted SSL support, SMTP-AUTH, mailinglists and virtual users and domains served from MySQL. I had a lot of help from the following articles.
- http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_debian_sarge
- http://www.howtoforge.com/virtual_postfix_mysql_quota_courier
- http://postfix.wiki.xs4all.nl/index.php?title=Virtual_Users_and_Domains_with_Courier-IMAP_and_MySQL
Now lets start using this server!