New Server Layout

It's been on my to-do list for a while, and I've finally begun the process of rearranging my personal servers.

I've always treated my personal servers like pets rather than cattle, usually only having a single server hosted somewhere that runs all of my things. Most recently this took the form of a single Digital Ocean VPS that I named ocean.kirsle.net and that costs $40/mo. for 4GB RAM, and it ran all sorts of things:

• All my websites including kirsle.net and a lot of legacy sites that don't even point to my server anymore but that I still had the document roots for.
• Various random PHP apps, and a Git server, and other random nonsense.
• My Minecraft survival server.
• My self-hosted e-mail.
• My XMPP chat server (until the server wouldn't start after a reboot one day).
• My OpenVPN server (until that stopped working one day and couldn't be fixed due to the kernel not creating the /dev/tap device).
• All sorts of random cruft on the filesystem, like custom-built local versions of Perl, Python 3.4 and Git.

The various sources of pressure that got me to finally start doing something about this include:

• The OpenVPN server was unfixable and I'd need to start from scratch with a new VPS to re-implement it properly.
• Digital Ocean added a Block Storage feature where you can attach a separately-growable disk to your VPS, but those are only available in certain datacenters so far. ocean.kirsle.net was hosted in SFO-1 but Block Storage was only available in SFO-2, so I wanted to eventually migrate to one of the data centers that supports this feature.
• It took me all day long to configure my self-hosted e-mail, and I didn't wanna do that again too soon. First I tried setting up a brand new mail.kirsle.net VPS so that I'd only have to configure mail one more time, but it wasn't going very well so I decided to go back to Google Apps for my e-mail. I still have a grandfathered free account there, anyway.

So, now I have a new server named web.kirsle.net that's only $10 for 1GB RAM and it hosts all my simple websites, including this one! It took about four hours to migrate all my websites over, and in the process I also stopped hosting many random things. Like I don't use Piwik Analytics anymore (a PHP app), nor do I host a Git server now. The new server is so much lighter than the old one for it. I don't even have PHP installed, or Apache either.

My Minecraft server will be moved to its own VPS shortly, before I finish decommissioning ocean.kirsle.net. I'll eventually add more servers when I need to in the future too, e.g. to have a dedicated server for databases.