Offsite Hosting/Meeting Notes 2017-05-08

Offsite Hosting

Date

Monday, 8 May 2017

Event Announcement

https://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/237779027/

Location

Communitech Jelly Bean Room 1st Floor, 151 Charles Street West, Kitchener, Ontario Map

Where are your servers? Are you self-hosting? Have you thought about professional hosting? What services does a professional hosting service offer? Do you need shared hosting? Do you need a VPS? What's a VPS? What's a colocation site? How much will all this cost?

Come share your experiences with self-hosting, shared hosting, and VPSes. Bob and Marc have the questions, and special guest Mark Steffen from indieServe Networks will have the answers.

See you at the meeting!

--Bob Jonkman and Marc Paré

• Offsite Hosting/Meeting Notes 2017-05-08

Video: https://youtu.be/p5o6Cc7Kja8 (courtesy of Gheorghe Curelet)

Introductions

• Today's guest is Mark Steffen from indieServe Networks

Selecting a hosting provider

• There's no "One size fits all"
• What do you need?
  • Disaster recovery?
  • Microsoft licensing?
  • E-mail hosting?

What kinds of servers for a host?

• Dell servers at one place
• Had HPs, didn't mind them
  • indieServe has some HP servers for colocation
• Lenovo, but there was BIOS based malware
  • Liked IBM servers, anecdotally liked the reliability
  • indieServe has all Lenovo servers

Offsite Hosting Problems?

• Shared hosting was OK for a while, but host was asking for more money
• Another company seemed perfect shared hosting (using WordPress),
  • Works today, but lots of complaints on Facebook, so he no longer trusts
• Backups?
  • Yes, keeping your own backups in addition to using the hosts' backups

indieServe Networks

• indieServe is hosting for KWLUG, KWVoIP, FairvoteWRC, KWPeace, &c.
• About $10/month for shared host
  • No limits but on the honour system
  • Keep it to one company per shared host
  • Local non-profits may be able to get really good deal -- talk to Mark Steffen
• Also has VPS (Virtual Private Servers)
• Can do hosted Windows servers or domain
  • Good for small file sharing systems
  • Microsoft has a specific licensing arrangement for hosting providers
  • Cost based on cores and sockets, plus number of customers
  • Not cheap, $100's /month
  • Similar model to Azure or Amazon AWS

Offsite Backups

• Some customers use offsite hosting only for data replication (disaster recovery)
  • Do keep offsite backups encrypted
  • For any backup solution check with Legal for PIPEDA legislation
  • Cheap backup? 20¢/GiByte for storage is typical
• Backup software:
  • Duplicity for Linux
  • Cloud Berry for backup service
  • DupliCaddy for Windows (Open Source, Beta software,supports SQL, kinda slow)
    • For Windows, do full backup, then everything is incremental afterwards
    • But it keeps a synthetic "Full" in the background
  • With S3 or Azure, you can restore to EC2 -- get (almost) instant restore on external VPS -- really cheap disaster recovery
  • Back Blaze (personal backup for $5/month, also B2 backup storage, .02c/Gibyte?, $10/month for 1 TByte?)

• indieServe keeps hard backups (USB drives stored offsite)

Backup horror stories

• Hijacked truck (backups not encrypted, nobody knows who now has access to backup data)
• Encrypted backups corrupted (physical disk damage corrupted one block of data, cypher block chaining made rest of backup inaccesible)
• Bulk files corrupted (backup file is OK, but contained invalid data, making rest of the backup invalid)
• Tape backup is still the most dense storage for immutable backups
• Mark Steffen has techniques for redundant backup storage (good for ransomware attacks, &c.)
• How much backup do you need?
  • How much data can you afford to lose?
  • Have at least one automated backup in place

Selfhosting?

• Run your own service on a VPS or shared host (XMPP, Wiki, Social media) instead of using Facebook, Google, Twitter)
• Manage your own server, colocated in a datacentre
• Getting a DSL line (with multi-link support), and running a server on premises
• Managed hosting - servers in house or colo, but contract out the SysAdmin

Webhosting Management

cPanel

• Set up WordPress, &c.
• Handles updates, patch management, backups, email
• Installatron for managing applications
• Varnish is a cache in front of Apache, for bursty traffic
• cPanel is pricey? $20/month for bare metal, less for a VPS
  • Keeping cPanel on a VPS makes it portable, allows cPanel admin to perform maintenance with no downtime

Zenserver

• A Virtual Machine host
• The free version is pretty unrestricted
• Use Zenserver to run cPanel

Cloud Linux

• uses CageFS,
• isolates users from each other

Other panels?

• CentOS Web Panel
• ISP Config
• Ubuntu MAAS
• WebMin, VirtualMin
• WHM is the management tool for cPanel
• WHMCS is a shopping cart / billing system for hosting
  • But these apps may have security issues (PHP doncha know)

Reseller hosting

• Perhaps for Web developers, who want to manage resources for their customers
• Can add multiple accounts, lets hosting provider manage growth and resources
• Could be unlimited accounts, but typically 300 GBytes, good for about 50 accounts