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In the Cloud

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Wd40
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Re: In the Cloud

Post by Wd40 » Fri, 05 May 2017 4:00 pm

Our data warehouse server: 32 core cpu, 256GB RAM Image Image

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Max Headroom
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Re: In the Cloud

Post by Max Headroom » Fri, 05 May 2017 4:20 pm

Yeah, ours is just a simpleton server, but it's good to have sole ownership over all of the hardware and software.

Question is if it's worthy enough to go cloud.

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Re: In the Cloud

Post by x9200 » Fri, 05 May 2017 6:15 pm

Max Headroom wrote:X9200, yes it's a dedicated physical machine. It dates back quite a few years, but the specs are still ok for us.

Memory: 2G
HDD: 70G
Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 2.80GHz, 2 cores

No databases or anything fancy. Just straight-up HTML and PHP auto-responder forms.

What do you think?
Some more questions: do you pay only for the hardware maintenance or also the software (updates, patching etc etc)? Resource-wise what you mentioned, for a small company will most of the time run without any problem on a vps with 0.5G RAM, some ssd space (that can be used for memory swap if needed) and 1 vcpu, but the critical question is, who is going to maintain the vps and respond to emergency situations. Why it was actually decided to go for the dedicated server? Resources, confidentiality or something else?

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Re: In the Cloud

Post by x9200 » Fri, 05 May 2017 6:20 pm

Max Headroom wrote:Yeah, ours is just a simpleton server, but it's good to have sole ownership over all of the hardware and software.

Question is if it's worthy enough to go cloud.
So this is ms windows I guess. Any dedicated software that you need and it runs only under windows?

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Re: In the Cloud

Post by Max Headroom » Fri, 05 May 2017 9:08 pm

X9200, it's a Plesk/Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP system; all hard and software issues are resolved by the ISP, including patches, updates and what-have-you.

I started of as a web designer back in 1998, designing and developing websites for SME's.

Pretty soon I was running 100+ websites on standalone hosting plans, on a shared server. The frequency of server crashes as a result of aforementioned script kiddies prompted me to move to a dedicated server.

Sites have come and gone, but all parameters, visitors, traffic, revenue, continued growing to this day.

Yeah, a dedicated server may be overkill, but I'm pleased with the thing.

That said, I would like to not fall behind, which is why I've been exploring a cloud environment.

So, what do you reckon, D.S. Or Cloud?

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Re: In the Cloud

Post by x9200 » Fri, 05 May 2017 9:58 pm

Definitely you should look for some virtual, scalable solution. If you can find someone who will configure and maintain for you an VPS also providing emergency services, I think it would be the most reasonable choice.
I am still confused what is this cloud you have in mind though. Most VPS providers call it cloud anyway, perhaps for the reason of resource distribution and geo-redundancy.

Myself, I use Digital Ocean for my projects:
https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/
They are reliable but they are a platform for developers so only naked virtual machines and you are the master of your small vps universe.

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Re: In the Cloud

Post by Max Headroom » Sat, 06 May 2017 7:36 am

Thanks X9200. Having a look-see there next.

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Re: In the Cloud

Post by Sporkin » Sat, 06 May 2017 8:53 am

Once you virtualize, you don't go back. The practical advantages apart from the infra is that your server is now data, version able, copyable, clonable. Someone messed up your server? No problem restore yesterday's version, moving to a different provider? No problemo, just copy your server

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Re: In the Cloud

Post by ecureilx » Sat, 06 May 2017 9:35 am

Sporkin wrote:Once you virtualize, you don't go back. The practical advantages apart from the infra is that your server is now data, version able, copyable, clonable. Someone messed up your server? No problem restore yesterday's version, moving to a different provider? No problemo, just copy your server

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That's why even resource hungry systems are being virtualised, with HCI.

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Re: In the Cloud

Post by x9200 » Sat, 06 May 2017 11:27 am

Sporkin wrote:Once you virtualize, you don't go back. The practical advantages apart from the infra is that your server is now data, version able, copyable, clonable. Someone messed up your server? No problem restore yesterday's version, moving to a different provider? No problemo, just copy your server

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This will probably depend on the hypevisors and such. Also, many cheaper VPS providers while offering backups of the system image don't offer the transfer of the images. I can copy from within the system the disk image, but to copy it to a new location I often had to overwrite the existing system alive what is hardy safe.
Within the same provider, yes, it's often easy, but cross-providers, not that sure.

Nb. what you mentioned is actually easier to be done with the standard physical servers, at least for the Linux distributions. The virtulization helps with redundancy (assuming professional providers) and resources but migrating a physical server is often as simple as cloning the harddrive and this is with the comfort that if something gets wrong, you have some extra means to fix the problem and not just a virtual console.

Again, it is always important to realize what is actually needed. I ran 3VPSes at this moment. 2 in Germany, one in London, and 4 physical itx/sbc mini servers: 3 in Singapore, one in Poland, plus 1 shared hosting in Singapore. Pluses and minuses.

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Re: In the Cloud

Post by Sporkin » Sat, 06 May 2017 12:15 pm

x9200 wrote:
Sporkin wrote:Once you virtualize, you don't go back. The practical advantages apart from the infra is that your server is now data, version able, copyable, clonable. Someone messed up your server? No problem restore yesterday's version, moving to a different provider? No problemo, just copy your server

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This will probably depend on the hypevisors and such. Also, many cheaper VPS providers while offering backups of the system image don't offer the transfer of the images. I can copy from within the system the disk image, but to copy it to a new location I often had to overwrite the existing system alive what is hardy safe.
Within the same provider, yes, it's often easy, but cross-providers, not that sure.

Nb. what you mentioned is actually easier to be done with the standard physical servers, at least for the Linux distributions. The virtulization helps with redundancy (assuming professional providers) and resources but migrating a physical server is often as simple as cloning the harddrive and this is with the comfort that if something gets wrong, you have some extra means to fix the problem and not just a virtual console.

Again, it is always important to realize what is actually needed. I ran 3VPSes at this moment. 2 in Germany, one in London, and 4 physical itx/sbc mini servers: 3 in Singapore, one in Poland, plus 1 shared hosting in Singapore. Pluses and minuses.
True that, cross hypervisor is trickier, doable but tricky. I do not like physical cloning, the whole idea of pulling hdds out and doing block perfect cloning.
There used to be some systems when logical filesystem cloning doesn't work, they store crap in specific sectors, and you have to clone the entire disk to another with the same number of sectors. I'm a lazy ass mouse clicker type of guy.

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Re: In the Cloud

Post by x9200 » Sat, 06 May 2017 12:42 pm

Windows - don't know, surely very sensitive at boot time, but for a Linux, migrating a physical machine could be like this:
1) you boot the new machine with a small linux distro. Yes, somebody has to switch it on, that's the problem, but as this is a physical machine there has to be somebody anyway.
2) A simple script automatically connects the machine with some port forwarding enabled to your old machine creating an access to the new one over a secure tunnel.
3) from any location with the network, you connect to the new machine
4) you copy over the network the partition table and the image of the FS. Sometimes you may need to re-install the boot loader but sometimes not. IIRC, there used to be a problem very long time ago if the disk geometries were different, but I don't recall any such issue in any recent year. In other words, if you just copy the whole disk to a bigger disk covering all initial sectors in a continuous manner there is a good chance it is going to boot on the new machine without any issues.
5) After it is up and running, the only thing to do is to resize the FSs what can be easy and safely done.
So you don't need to remove any hdds and you may stay all the time behind your desk :)

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Re: In the Cloud

Post by Max Headroom » Sat, 06 May 2017 12:58 pm

A lot of info, chaps. Thanks for that. Alas, most of the technical stuff is above my pay grade lah.

But I do know this, you can mirror an HD and paste the copy onto another server, even if it's a third party ISP server. That should be easy enough, in theory. I mean, the problem is that the current ISP may not be so keen on providing that service, as it obviously means they're on the way out.

Also, a practical issue I'm envisaging is that all these sites came into being successively. This means that their respective domain registration expiration will be spread out over a 12 month period.

Given this, what would be the smartest way to transfer these domains/sites, i.e. without ending up with huge domain registration overlap (read: double registration fee), or ending up paying for 2 servers till that year is up?

Or do I just have to bite the bullet?

I'd like to go in eyes wide open; obviously, I'm aiming for a seamless transition, which won't be easy, since, to make things a little more adventurous, I'll be moving the lot from Europe to Singers as well.

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Re: In the Cloud

Post by x9200 » Sat, 06 May 2017 1:37 pm

The ideal solution would be for each domain to stay with your current provider until the domain expiration date. Normally this can be done without any fuss. The domain registration is somehow separated from any other services (the provider is just a man in the middle) and normally there is a separate panel to manage the domains.

If this works, then you just change the domain delegation to point to the new provider dns servers.
When the domains are about to expire, you take the codes from the old provider and transfer the domains to the new one and point o the new server.

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Re: In the Cloud

Post by Max Headroom » Mon, 08 May 2017 7:01 am

Makes sense, X9200. Cheers.

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