I am finally starting to outgrow my relationship with my current co-location service. In a nutshell, I built and configured this server and pay a company to run it in their facility. It’s been great for years and really has been incredibly cheap compared to most co-location costs. However, due to raising costs as well as the new technology of virtually hosted machines, I will be moving to a new facility.

The biggest problem I have at this time is remote access. It takes me roughly 1.5 hours to get to the facility, so if/when there is a problem, that really isn’t very convenient. I am currently sharing a connection with eric and he has been more then gracious to help with problems since he lives far closer to the facility then I do. However, I hate relying on other people, and moreso, I hate to waste eric’s precious time, so it is time to move. With the new system, it will allow me to have full console access to the machine, so if I have to reboot it or get at the boot process (failed kernel upgrade, etc), I can do that via ssh or the web. Also, using a virtual based system also means that hardware failures will no longer be my problem; the facility takes care of that themselves. They will also handle hardware and systems upgrades; all I need to worry about is the OS and software.

Now the hard part. I have to start migrating all of users and hosted web sites to the new system. I have what I believe will be a decent and rock solid plan to migrate. I have already purchased the virtual machine and have begun the process of getting the necessary software and daemons working there. After some testing, I will start to migrate the web data. This is going to take some time actually, because rsync-ing 12GB of data won’t happen immediately. After that is complete I plan to start migrating user home directories which include mail setup. Again, I do not see a problem here, but transferring that much data across the Net will take some time. During that time, I will have to shut some things down and allow the backup mail server at my home to queue up old messages. Once the migration is complete, I can enable the mail system at the new facility and offload the messages manually from the backup server.

Again, this is the plan. I’m sure I will run into a hiccup here and there, but that’s expected. My main goal is no data loss. I would hate to lose any email messages that I have and I bet my users agree.

The good news is that once the migration is complete, I will have one hell of a server left over. That means I will be able to upgrade my server at home and will really be set.