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Dedicated Servers

I recently bought a Kimsufi-2G Dedicated Server from OVH (well, Kimsufi…). I’m using it to host project websites, where non-php programs might need to be run. Infact – I moved this blog over to the new server, so if you’re reading this, then all is well.

I’ve always wanted a dedicated server. VPS’s are good, but the thought of having a physical machine in a datacenter somewhere is, for some reason, very appealing to me. The server is costing me £16.80 a month, which isn’t too bad. I have  5TB of Bandwidth, 1TB hard disk, 2GB RAM and 1.2GHz Celeron. At first, I thought that the processor would be horrifically under-powered for my needs – but it’s coping very well. Infact, it’s doing better than another server I had, with a 2.66GHz Celeron Processor. The 1.2GHz Celeron is considerably newer than the 2.66GHz Celeron, and has 512KB L2 cache rather than 256KB – I put the different in speed down to that.

I opted to install Virtualmin, so that if any of my friends needed some hosting, I could quickly create them account. It uses a bit of RAM.. at the moment, with a couple of dynamic sites (including this one), memory usage is at 384MB. If this where a low end VPS, i would be slightly concerened – but given that I have 2GB RAM, it’s not a big issue for me.

I have set up the dedicated server to be my primary nameserver, with my $3.50/m BuyVM VPS being my secondary. This should provide a decent amount of redundancy, as the two servers are physically very far apart.

It is very tempting to get a Kimsufi 16G, which would have (as the name suggests) 16GB RAM, along with a quad core I5 (or better), a 2TB Hard Drive and 10TB Bandwidth for £43/m. However, I can’t really justify that price… especially since my £16.80 Server is treating me just fine.

Home Server

I have recently have another go with my home server – This time with a 1.4GHz Celeron, complete with 512MB ram an a 40GB hard disk. It works a treat!

It’s got cli-only install of Debian Squeeze (6.0), running as a DHCP server, DNS Server, and chiefly a squid proxy server. Every computer/device in the house is configured to use the machine as a proxy. Whenever a website is loaded, static elements such as images, flash files, and some pages (static ones…) are saved to the proxies cache. Then, whenever a page is re-requested, rather than re-download everything again (including images, and other bandwidth-consuming items), it can serve them from the local cache – reducing internet bandwidth usage, and reducing load time! Both great things, especially considering that I have a 30GB on-peak bandwidth limit. There are some issues with caching YouTube (because of their particularly efficient usage of load balancing)… but some fixes have been suggested online. Research shall be done!

I use a DG834G as my router, and have flashed it with the TeamDG Firmware. While this is great, it does not allow me to SAVE iptables rules, which is very unfortunate. If this was possible, then I could start using transparent proxying, which would mean that clients did not need to be configured – useful if a guest uses our wireless network, for example. Oh well, you can’t win them all!

Along with dhcp3-server, bind9 and squid2.7, I have also installed Apache and Munin. This lets me view nice graphs of various things, including RAM usage, CPU Usage, hard disk usage, eth0 bandwidth utilisation and squid proxy status. You can view it here if you are so inclined!