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Initial server migration complete..

28 January 2020 12:20

So recently I talked about how I was moving my email to a paid GSuite account, that process has now completed.

To recap I've been paying approximately €65/month for a dedicated host from Hetzner:

  • 2 x 2Tb drives.
  • 32Gb RAM.
  • 8-core CPU.

To be honest the server itself has been fine, but the invoice is a little horrific regardless:

  • SB31 - €26.05
  • Additional subnet /27 - €26.89

I'm actually paying more for the IP addresses than for the server! Anyway I was running a bunch of virtual machines on this host:

  • mail
    • Exim4 + Dovecot + SSH
    • I'd SSH to this host, daily, to read mail with my console-based mail-client, etc.
  • www
    • Hosted websites.
    • Each different host would run an instance of lighttpd, serving on localhost:XXX running under a dedicated UID.
    • Then Apache would proxy to the right one, and handle SSL.
  • master
    • Puppet server, and VPN-host.
  • git
  • ..
    • Bunch more servers, nine total.

My plan is to basically cut down and kill 99% of these servers, and now I've made the initial pass:

I've now bought three virtual machines, and juggled stuff around upon them. I now have:

  • debian - €3.00/month
  • dns - €3.00/month
    • This hosts my commercial DNS thing
    • Admin overhead is essentially zero.
    • Profit is essentially non-zero :)
  • shell - €6.00/month
    • The few dynamic sites I maintain were moved here, all running as www-data behind Apache. Meh.
    • This is where I run cron-jobs to invoke rss2email, my google mail filtering hack.
    • This is also a VPN-provider, providing a secure link to my home desktop, and the other servers.

The end result is that my hosting bill has gone down from being around €50/month to about €20/month (€6/month for gsuite hosting), and I have far fewer hosts to maintain, update, manage, and otherwise care about.

Since I'm all cloudy-now I have backups via the provider, as well as those maintained by rsync.net. I'll need to rebuild the shell host over the next few weeks as I mostly shuffled stuff around in-place in an adhoc fashion, but the two other boxes were deployed entirely via Ansible, and Deployr. I made the decision early on that these hosts should be trivial to relocate and they have been!

All static-sites such as my blog, my vanity site and similar have been moved to netlify. I lose the ability to view access-logs, but I'd already removed analytics because I just don't care,. I've also lost the ability to have custom 404-pages, etc. But the fact that I don't have to maintain a host just to serve static pages is great. I was considering using AWS to host these sites (i.e. S3) but chose against it in the end as it is a bit complex if you want to use cloudfront/cloudflare to avoid bandwidth-based billing surprises.

I dropped MX records from a bunch of domains, so now I only receive email at steve.fi, steve.org.uk, and to a lesser extent dns-api.com. That goes to Google. Migrating to GSuite was pretty painless although there was a surprise: I figured I'd setup a single user, then use aliases to handle the mail such that:

  • debian@example -> steve
  • facebook@example -> steve
  • webmaster@example -> steve

All told I have about 90 distinct local-parts configured in my old Exim setup. Turns out that Gsuite has a limit of like 20 aliases per-user. Happily you can achieve the same effect with address maps. If you add an address map you can have about 4000 distinct local-parts, and reject anything else. (I can't think of anything worse than having wildcard handling; I've been hit by too many bounce-attacks in the past!)

Oh, and I guess for completeness I should say I also have a single off-site box hosted by Scaleway for €5/month. This runs monitoring via overseer and notification via purppura. Monitoring includes testing that websites are up, that responses contain a specific piece of text, DNS records resolve to expected values, SSL certificates haven't expired, & etc.

Monitoring is worth paying for. I'd be tempted to charge people to use it, but I suspect nobody would pay. It's a cute setup and very flexible and reliable. I've been pondering adding a scripting language to the notification - since at the moment it alerts me via Pushover, Email, and SMS-messages. Perhaps I should just settle on one! Having a scripting language would allow me to use different mechanisms for different services, and severities.

Then again maybe I should just pay for pingdom, or similar? I have about 250 tests which run every two minutes. That usually exceeds most services free/cheap offerings..

| 3 comments

 

Comments on this entry

icon Iustin Pop at 12:47 on 29 January 2020
https://k1024.org/

Interesting. I still self-host everything except mail, but my infrastructure is much smaller so the cost is also smaller, which leads to no real pressure to migrate.

Netlify looks interesting, good to keep in mind, but a bit too much automagic. I could migrate to it, but they seem to prever hosting even DNS with them.

icon Steve Kemp at 12:40 on 7 February 2020
https://steve.fi/

I migrated to netlify despite remaining in control of my own DNS-hosting; mostly I just setup CNAME records for www-prefixed sites, and pointed apex-domains at a particular IP address.

If you assume it is just "Upload content and access it via a random https://foo.netlify.com location" it is pretty simple.

icon FYI at 19:23 on 7 February 2020

On Cloudflare (that you seem to use), you can CNAME the apex domains as well. ("Cname flattening", just another name for ALIAS)