Offsite Hosting/Meeting Notes 2017-05-08

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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


Video

Offsite Internet servers hosting - YouTube (courtesy of Gheorghe Curelet)

Meeting Notes

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, .02¢/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
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