(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.

But thanks for that info - as you (probably) know this thing hangs off a mysql database and although I've tried to minimise the number of queries needed to display any particular page, when it comes down to it you've still got to through a few Mb of tables around.

s/through/throw/. Another thing I want to add is a "whoops" feature that lets you correct typos in your previous move.

The Banter Page (this page) is wider than the others at the moment, so I have to scroll right to get to the 'up' and 'next' options.

Although it might revert when Dan's post has disappeared offscreen.

Ah, it doesn't do that on Firefox.

I wouldn't object if you modified or replaced it.

BTW, the web host for xtrahost.net appears to be located in the Scotland facility, if node names are anything to go by. I'd be tempted to relocate there myself and damn the exchange rate, but unfortunately I get 160ms ping times to it from my colo and 200ms from my home. That's fine for web stuff but I'd be unhappy with shell access and any other activity involving lots of small round trips.

Not to beat it to death but according to their FAQ the Xen hosting in Scolocate, which according to Google maps is within a reasonable definition of Edinburgh; perhaps 5 miles from the big rock with the funny house on top.

I'll get onto it - work's been a bit crazy today, but this machine just dropped off the internet completely for a bit - was a bit worried cos I'd be poking around with some of the security settings earlier and thought it had been a hack. Ho hum, we all still seem to be here, and the mysql tables are all still up and running.

The Gyle, eh? Who'da thought it. A bit closer than Bush, which was guess #1. Definitely worth looking into!

A VPS has been ordered, although I managed to lock myself out of my own online banking service in the process... Anyway, it should be with us over the next few days, so I hope to be able to migrate in the next week or so. Which is just as well, cos this machine needed another reboot last night. And my internet at home has stopped working, which is the next thing to try and sort out.

It's arrived... installing stuff as we speak, but since my internet at home seems to be fubar it'll probably take longer to get sorted than it would normally.

VPS? I'm trying to follow this talk of hosting and hardware because I would like to understand how it all goes together, but it's mostly greek to me unfortunately. I read it that the computer that this site is kept on is playing up and so a new one is needed. If you've a mind to explain, rab, I'd love to know whether you own the faulty computer or lease space on someone else's? Please excuse any howlers caused by my ignorance of the technology behind the web.

Also, please excuse howlers caused by my inability to proof read my own punctuation. Sorry.