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Maintainable Servers - 4 years of service and counting

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Today one of my personal servers reached a new milestone, it’s 4th year of service! To commemorate the occasion I’ve written about how I run my servers in a way that is maintainable. I’m also excited because I just updated from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.0 and from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 with no serious problems. This was the most maintenance I have had to do in the last 4 years and it only took several hours.

What runs on them?

  • Websites that I personally maintain and develop
  • Friends websites which are mostly WordPress and a few static sites
  • A Mono web api
  • Half a dozen cronjobs
  • Mailboxes for my domains

When a website or service starts to outgrow the resources of this shared box I re-evaluate it’s needs. At that point it might move to the cloud.

Why do you run servers yourself?

  1. It keeps me up to date on server technologies. I think its important for any developer who works on backend software to understand the rest of the server. For example, understanding how workers work in a web server can directly affect high level applications are designed.
  2. I can generally get better performance from my applications over hosting it on a PAAS.
  3. It saves time on new development, the setup step is complete before starting.
  4. Sometimes it’s useful to have a shell that’s always online and unrestricted for commands. Ever need an SSH proxy in another country?
  5. It’s cheap! $$$

How much does it cost, what are the specs?

I pay $54/year for one server.

The specs I have on my primary server are:

  • 2 CPU cores
  • 1 GB of memory
  • 3 TB of data transfer, up to 10 Gbit/s
  • 30 GB of SSD storage
  • 1 Dedicated IPv4 address

Here’s a comparison based on the closest available options based on the specs of my primary server listed above.

Current AWS LightSail DigitalOcean Azure
$54/yr $120/yr $240/yr $205/yr

I tried to compare a few others but most cloud providers optimize for higher memory and scale then I need. It may be easier to compare larger instances. GCM is between $49.06/yr and $1,292.10/yr depending on which resources are shared. I encountered a similar issue when trying to compare AWS EC2 instances directly.

Note: My estimates only consider CPU, Memory, Transfer, and same instance SSD storage. These estimates do not take into account fees, licensing costs, or storage when charged separately from cpu & memory. I’m disregarding special features & services that may raise the value of services that are specific to each provider.

How’s the uptime?

I’ve had one notable outage in the last 4 years. A friend added one of my domains to his monitoring service back in 2010. You can see uptime for every day since 2010 here.

What is your stack?

I use a control panel on my systems to allow myself and other developers to interact with the server more easily. For this I use Vestacp it makes managing the server easier on myself without getting in the way.

My current stack with this is

  • Nginx in front of Apache with mod_php7, mod_mono for websites
  • NodeJS: Server side applications
  • MySQL: Database
  • Bind9: DNS Server
  • Exim: SMTP Server
  • Dovecot: IMAP/POP3 Server
  • vsftpd: FTP Server
  • iptables: Firewall
  • Cron: Scheduling
  • New Relic: Monitoring
  • Blackfire: PHP performance testing

I frequently swap parts in and out. Sometime in the next few months ill probably add a Go server behind Nginx.

How long have you been doing this?

I have two servers currently: Server A: I’ve had this one for 4 years tomorrow. During that time it’s had only one notable outage for several hours. Server B: I didn’t need this one when I got it, but my provider had a killer Black Friday. Turned out to be useful so I kept it since November 2015.

Since 2009 I have had several other servers with other providers. I’m pretty happy with my current one though and haven’t needed to switch since 2013.

Who’s your provider?

I presently use prometeus which has been a good experience. They have the right mix of support for me. I only contact them when there’s something I cant do from the control panel they provide, which means I’ve only ever contacted them with billing questions.

Thanks for reading

If you have any questions feel free to reach out to me. While writing this I realized there are several more topics that I could go into greater depth on and which will likely be future posts.

  • Advantages & disadvantages of hosting a website in a shared server environment
  • An overview of VestaCP for managing a server and websites
  • Configuring Nginx with a Go web server