Well if the DNS has propagated properly I’m writing this on my new virtual server!

Our co-lo hosts put their prices up and then decided to get out of the market altogther, so the Netra will be winging its way back to us, and I’ve gone for a UK-based VPS which costs a fifth as much and seems to perform better – well sun4u is pretty dated hardware compared to a slice of core2quad xeon!

The VPS is unmanaged, so you basically have to set everything up yourself other than the OS install. Which I’ve done over about two nights using the following tutorials and my own knowledge:

I disabled ClamAV as we don’t really have any Windows machines and it was using up to 160Mb of my 512Mb base memory just waiting to scan for viruses. Now I’ve just got to get some spam to test out the filters!

I’ve also upgraded the WordPress installation to the latest version – I found that the easiest way to migrate to the new server was to actually tar up the MySQL files rather than using the wordpress.xml method.

Unusually for a VPS, you even get console access – so if you’ve locked yourself out of SSH or screwed up the firewall rules, you can just SSH to the terminal server on the host. There’s also some web-based management thing.

Update: Just looked into the logs and Amavis was setup to quarantine all spam as well as viruses, so I’ve changed it to simply delete all spam above a certain score, delete all viruses, delete a few of my old email addresses and quarantine what’s left, which so far has been near zero – other than legit email of course!