After just under 4 years on the same machine (827 days since last reboot!), my old server was finally being scheduled to be end-of-lifed by my ISP (NetDepot/GNAX who have been phenomenal – I’ve been hosting w/ them since moving off EV1/ThePlanet back in 2007).

This machine has definitely been lapped a few times – it’s an old C2Q Q9660 w/ 8GB of RAM with a 500GB boot drive and a 2TB storage drive, but it’s been solid, as has the network and support.

If you’re seeing this message that means that the DNS change should have propagated (hooray!). While NetDepot graciously offered to migrate me to a new machine for the same rate plan (a very reasonable $120/mo), I went ahead and have decided to dip my toes into the waters w/ OVH running one of their SP1 servers.

I am now paying $80/mo for a 4Q E3-1245v2 w/ 32GB RAM and 2x2TB SW RAID1 storage w/ a 200Mbps connection. The OVH NA data center is located in Quebec, Canada (OVH is a French ISP and their other 2 data centers are located in France) and seems pretty fast, and so far, service has been… well, responsive, if not entirely helpful (despite being one of the world’s largest ISPs (#4 right now), they have some weird gaps like no recurring billing).

Guess we’ll see how this goes.

OVH Notes:

• Their servers come prerooted – you should comment/mv the /root/.ssh/authorized_keys2 file if that seems icky (documentation)
• There’s also an rtm script that runs regularly via /etc/crontab, but that seems pretty harmless/useful.
• Server setup via vague new server setup recipe – one day I’ll sit down and learn Ansible