[Dovecot] Ok, I've given up

[Ed W]

On 17/06/2010 12:19, William Blunn wrote:
>
> Rent a virtual machine (e.g. Xen based). This saves you having to make 
> capital expenditure on hardware (= keeps the bean counter happy).

I haven't found virtual machines to be especially price efficient when 
you need plenty of storage available?  Do you have a recommendation?

If you treat carefully around the edges of the bulk hosting sites there 
seem to be some reasonable quality options, eg:
     http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/eq4/
50 Euro/month including 2x 750GB drives


> Also it means you can do backups to S3 over the backbone.

How are you backing up to S3? Most of the options I have seen have some 
serious issues that limit reliable full backups?  Its been on my todo 
list for some time now to fix the C s3fs implementation that you find 
here: http://code.google.com/p/s3fs/ - code is shocking and could easily 
be fixed up pretty well...

http://s3tools.org/ - seems maintained, but not used it?

Brackup seems excellent, but has only an initial patch to support 
backing up user permissions, so at this stage seems more useful for data 
files than a whole system backup?

Also you have the option of cheap hosting through the likes of say 
Dreamhost or Kimsufi
     http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/ks/
£15/month for a single machine with a single 250GB (non backed up) 
disk.  Twice that price can get you multiple TB disks.  Use this plus rsync?

Not really sure where the sweet spot is here, but unsure what S3 really 
buys us?


> I've not generally noticed a problem with uptime these days.

It becomes a challenge doesn't it... I just had to reboot a machine with 
something like 2+ years of uptime in order to upgrade a kernel and it's 
kind of annoying to see the uptime reset!

Cheers

Ed W