MCiOS thanks you. It would only take a moment to restart it at my home server and point the domain name at it (though it'd be a day or so before that change propagated through the intarweb), but the site gets a LOT of hits, including various kinds of attacks, and it would be a bad idea to inflict that on my home router for several reasons. Anyway, I'm going to have the machine professionally serviced, which will probably bring us into next week. This feels weird. It hasn't been down for more than a few hours since I launched it. I may give up on this colocation lark and go back to a virtual server of some kind; there are better and easier options for rapid failover when you do it that way.

[Dan] Indeed, there can't have been many days since last century when I didn't at least check in and look around at MCiOS. Still, I'm viewing it as a test of character!

Yeah, I still find myself typing "p" into the address bar as a shortcut to MCiOS. ("d" goes to Orange, "r" goes to here. Obvious reasons. But I'm so used to those shortcuts, if I use another computer it knocks me sideways for a minute.)

[Darren] Same with me! Except I use "pa", "du" and "ra".

How do you do that then? I just got 'em in me favourites.

Sounds like do-re-mi.

Nono, do is domaintools.com, re is resource-zone.com and mi is usually nothing, but right now it's mikael.jansson.be/rydis.html.

That's got to be an application for Web 3.0. Opening a webpage by whistling a merry tune.

Another reboot required this morning. I shall try and move to a different host this week.

I thought I couldn't get in last night.

For those who are able to access it - tonight [Sunday] sees a series of programmes on BBC TV 4 beginning at 2100, which are all related to the London Underground. Includes the 'Design Classics' prog about the LU map.

[rab] With server farms you tend to get what you pay for -- decent reliable dedicated servers run at least a hundred a month in dollars and not very much less in pounds. If you want to pay a lot less than that and want top quality hardware and good service, you might consider a Xen host instead. The decent providers use very good hardware and they maintain it with a lot of care because if it goes down, more customers are affected than just you. And you can't tell the difference in terms of availability and performance; if anything it'll be much better than a cheap colo because most of the time the (often very muscular) CPU is way underutilized. You never get less than the share you're paying for and more often than not you get much more when you need it. And it's spectacularly easy to fail over to another machine -- a good provider will be able to switch you to new hardware in a matter of minutes if smoke starts pouring out of the box you're on. Frankly I'm seriously considering going back to that my self, mainly for that last reason.

xensource's list and hostingfu's. Both list UK providers, though you have to scroll down to find them in the latter.

Oh, for three years I ran mcios and several other sites, both http and https, an SMTP server, a jabber server with several transports, mysql, pop3 and imap, the homebrew chat server of course and a variety of other services that came and went over the years ... all in 64MB instance of User Mode Linux; a poor man's Xen. It was a little swappy but completely responsive and reliable. It was on good hardware though. A 256M Xen host would be an Aston Martin by comparison.

[Dan] Thanks for that - I was considering a 128MB Xen Vps but was slightly concerned it might not be up to the job of serving this site, which gets something like 5k hits a day.

[rab] How about hosting in Edinburgh? Though you'd probably want to traceroute them to find out if it's really close to you in terms of network hops; I'm three miles but 12 hops and 85ms from mine because of a lack of local peering between carriers, but your situation is likely to be different. Very low latency could be handy for maintenance; you could just mount drives remotely.

(Though it's not clear from their site that they offer Xen in their Embra facility, you'd have to phone to find out. And I'm not vouching for them as a provider -- I know nothing about them.)

[Dan] That company was on my shortlist of two. Haven't got round to emailing them yet, but I'll ask if they host Xen in (or, if my hunch as to the actual location is correct, near) Edinburgh.

128 should be fine. I run an identical setup at home on 128MB Xen server, and by far the biggest memory hog is mysql. Here's the memory footprint, 12 days since the last reboot:

dan@flint:~$ free total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 131252 110836 20416 0 4632 38480
-/+ buffers/cache: 67724 63528
Swap: 131064 2228 128836

Those are pretty healthy numbers -- just enough swapping to indicate that it doesn't have more memory than it needs, without being significant.

Yikes, looks like you're discarding newlines. Okay, look in the chat game on mcios.

Whoops, had forgotten there would be instances where white-space would be significant. Hmm, looks like I need a PRE-tag handler.