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Wed, 17 Apr 2013

VPSs, Nagios, .com domains

My revenues have been between $900 and $1425 over the past four months, so in January I decided to splurge and get VPS instances from two providers.

I read online about what people thought. A lot of people liked Linode so I went with them. For $20 a month I get 2 TB outbound transfer, 24 gigs of storage, a priority CPU and a share of eight others, and 1 gig of RAM. In January that was 512MB of RAM and 200 gigs of transfer, but there has been competition in the VPS space.

Rackspace seemed popular as well. People were less enthused, but it was deemed OK. So I got a VPS with them. With the lowest price "cloud server" you get 20 gigs disk, 1 virtual CPU, and 512MB RAM. Pricing is $16.06 a month but does not include traffic. With 32-33 gigs going out it is $20 a month. I send out less than 1 gig a month so I am charged around $16.18. Of course, these policies determine how I use the servers. I served 33 gigs of data from Linode in March.

I'm running Debian 6.0 on both servers. I run Debian because - what else am I going to run? I've worked with Debian since Vincent Yesue introduced Debian to me back in the mid 1990s. I'm familiar with it. I run Ubuntu on my desktop so I'm familiar with dpkg. I could run Fedora or CentOS (can't afford Red Hat at this stage) but Debian seemed fine enough.

I decided to set up a Nagios instance on my desktop and watch Dreamhost, Bluehost, Rackspace and Linode. I knew how flaky Dreamhost was, now I really know. Any how, I've been slowly shifting everything to the VPSs.

I run BIND 8 on both VPSs for primary and secondary DNS. I also run Apache on both VPSs. Rackspace is the front end web site. Linode I use for serving epub files, and also to handle search queries. So I run MySQL on Linode as well.

Last week, Nagios said Linode was slow. So I began culling down memory usage on Apache, BIND and MySQL. Nagios still said it was slow. So I began timing web page gets from other locations, and Linode was fine. The connection from my ISP to Linode was just slow for a few hours. It's probably better I tuned it any how.

I had some domain name ideas while doing this, so I signed up with Namecheap and got some domain names. I will probably be holding most of my domain names there hence forth. The number of dot com names registered are in the hundreds of millions. It keeps going up. I remember back in 1996 when names like proof.com were still unregistered, I missed snapping that up by a few days. Someone just e-mailed me offering to sell me a domain name for $350,000.

So I saw some a domain I wanted expiring. I used snapnames.com to scoop it up. And I got it. So now I have bookmarkflood.com. Most of the domains I have are either connected to books or bookmarks.

I want to improve my programming knowledge, more specifically Java, more specifically Android. But programming in general as well. Besides, Android is not all about Java - a lot of what I've been doing with Android has been C and C++ apps using the NDK. Or server side programs - usually Perl so far.

I've been reading Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. I have been taking my time to go through it. Right now I am on section 1.2.3.

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