Moving my production website to VirMach VPS!
TLDR: moving my production ecommerce site to Virmach for cost savings and because of low traffic
So I've got an eCommerce website selling mostly used stuff online for probably 15 years now. Speaker parts, stereo stuff, vintage computers, video games, Legos, collectibles- anything and everything I can find at thrift stores or by the side of the road that people might want to buy. First year was with GoDaddy but GoDaddy limited the number of inodes so eventually moved to moved to 1&1 webhosting for a year or two. Then on to Hostripples for a few more years which offered the amazing price of $1 a month for unlimited everything webhosting. Had on/off problems with Hostripples emails not getting through.
Discovered LET and figured I'd host my own website on my own VPS and my own email server too. What could possibly go wrong??? As most people probably know in a case like mine it's never worth it to run your own email server, but it was already too late because I had caught the VPS bug and never looked back. Maybe 6 years ago LaunchVPS offered a "3GB RAM/30GB storage VPS Special" on LET for $48 a year and I got one. I actually choose that offer because their datacenter was located in Philly which is about 40 miles from me, for some reason at the time I thought the location was important.
LaunchVPS has been great. Very very few problems over the years and they even gave me an extra 20GB storage for free when space started getting tight (LOTS of images...). But now I've got super inexpensive Virmach and Crunchbits VPSs which I've been using for daily/weekly/monthly backups and other mostly hobby websites. When this year's LaunchVPS renewal came due I asked if I could get a big discount, my reasoning being that while $48 year was a good deal 6 years ago for Intel CPU and SSD prices have come way down, specs have went way up, so.... They declined although did offer a free month if I renewed.
If my eCommerce site was doing good business I'd stick with LaunchVPS- $48 a year for dependable service is really a great deal. But about 6 months ago something happened with Google indexing my site and sending me new customers- site hits and sales kept getting lower and lower. I tried new SEO stuff, tried removing all the sold listings which I kept online for reference, tried changing what Google indexed but nothing helped. Low traffic turned into almost no traffic. I get almost no sales through the website now unless I specifically refer someone to it and ask them to go through checkout. ALTHOUGH it seems to be picking up a little lately, we'll see. I do also sell through other sources but ideally all the business would be through my site.
I use Webmin/Virtualmin for all my VPS control panels and they make it easy to transfer a complete website from one VPS to another. Previously I'd moved my website temporarily to my Virmach Chicago VPS for a few weeks while I upgraded my shopping cart software on LaunchVPS. I had no issues during those few weeks- no downtime, no glitches, no problems.
So now am going to make the move permanent. If Chicago starts experiencing issues I will have a backup ready to go up on my Crunchbits LES special, hopefully within an hour or two. But the main reason am moving off LaunchVPS is because if I end up with downtime it's no longer a big deal. Instead of losing MILLIONS now I will only be losing pennies. If that. Won't get upset for a day or even a week of downtime now.
Will update this post after a few weeks or months to let all interested (and uninterested) parties about the experience.
Praise LES!
Praise VirMach!
Praise all LESbians! (and thanks for your help over the years)
Comments
Good luck mate
if your web-based business can't justify more than $1/month in hosting costs then it's definitely a very reasonable business that you should host on a single VirMach server, ideally one of their premium LA instances.
VirmAche is the best.
You can get one million SLA store credits for each minute your server is down.
Currency: tear drops
No hostname left!
Mentally strong people
Good job
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Was there any motivation to switch providers besides the loss of revenue?
If it is relatively easy for you to maintain two VMs, the VirMach and the Crunchbits LES special, with the same info, there are methodologies to do failover so your site only goes down for a few minutes in one half of the world.
Peace on earth will come to stay, when we all live as LESbians every day.
For staff assistance or support issues please use the helpdesk ticket system at https://support.lowendspirit.com/index.php?a=add
good luck to production website
Currency exchange 100 tear drops = 1 push up . I think it it will work out!
Was it your actions that caused Chicago to go offline?
Have the honor of being the crybaby who pays $20 for a 128MB VPS at VirMach in 2023.
Main reason is because by low end standards $48 year is a lot for that VPS. I'd gladly pay more for LaunchVPS service but was thinking around $24 a year would be the sweet spot. With VirMach super low prices and Crunchbits LES special as a fallback I think it's time to make the move, have been thinking about it for last few years anyway. Being lazy is what has stopped me from doing it in earlier.
Not that it will make much difference to my site unless traffic really picks up a lot but my VPS on LVPS uses E5-2620 v3 CPUs and SSD. VirMach has Ryzen and Nvme.
i would probably put production on crunchbits instead
I bench YABS 24/7/365 unless it's a leap year.
Thanks FZ.
What method(s) would you recommend I look into first? I'm a relative linux newbie
Would the two VPS have to be exactly identical or would it be easy to keep my OwnCloud and a separate website up on Crunchy?
I neither confirm nor deny this
99.8868% Overall uptime
@JDMcPea Congrats! Good luck!
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
Why Not In Good Standing?Best wishes to you!
Being a newbie with a low traffic website the simplest would be to get an account at BunnyCDN not as a CDN but because they have a feature called BunnyDNS. This is an anycast DNS network that does geocast and uptime monitoring.
You could use BunnyDNS as the DNS servers for your domain. In the zone file you can setup both of the two server IPs. VirMach and Crunchbits, in two separate "A" records pointing to your web server domain and any required webserver sub domains at both VMs.
In both of your domain.com and sub.domain.com dns "A" records:
1. Set the TTL to 5 minutes.
2. Then in the advanced settings under "Smart Record Type" select "Geographic" and enter the latitude and longitude of each server location.
3. Set "Monitoring" to "HTTP".
4. Enable both records
5. Setup MX, TXT and any other required DNS records for the domain.
6. Switch the DNS name servers at your domain registrar to kiki.bunny.net [91.200.176.1] and coco.bunny.net [109.104.147.1]
7. Bob's your uncle *
Assuming your VMs are in Chicago and Valley Forge, PA some people will get routed to one VM and some to the other all the time based on the above. If the first IP served by the DNS is down modern browsers will go to the the second IP automatically. If sending traffic to both VMs simultaneously is not something that is right for you, then disable one of the records above. You will then need to manually switch the DNS record the other way [disabled/enabled] if the primary server goes down. The vast majority of your potential clients will still only see the website down for a few minutes, not hours.
There are more/better ways to do failover, but they are more complicated when using VMs that do not have failover as a cloud feature or option of the provider. IE not as lowend.
I have a DNS system that I use that does the same as the Bunny but automatically withdrawals the record when a server is down. If you don't want to, or don't feel comfortable setting up the BunnyDNS, I can set your domain up on my DNS servers with the failover at no cost.
EDIT:
The BunnyDNS free tier should work at no cost for you.
I forgot to answer the second part of your question.
No, the VMs do not need to be identical and you could run anything you wished, Including any additional websites on ether VM.
Only the website that you wish to keep up need to be identical on both VMs because in the first BunnyDNS scenario above both websites are being served at the same time and they split the load, somewhat. I said this because I don't know if your site is static or not. If not and you were not capable of setting up master/master databases or other methods of synchronizing the databases it could be problematic to maintain.
Peace on earth will come to stay, when we all live as LESbians every day.
For staff assistance or support issues please use the helpdesk ticket system at https://support.lowendspirit.com/index.php?a=add
I read the title and started laughing. I'll read the rest later but there's probably a good chance if you were in Tokyo, Chicago, or Los Angeles there was some comedic timing.
Fail over on Bunny is one of the things I've been meaning to look at as well. Ty.
I probably should not be tempting fate, but ....
I have a Virmach New York and two Tokyo that are down in a six VM geocast setup. Only effect is Tokyo is a bit slow.
This is not running on BunnyDNS. This is mine.
Peace on earth will come to stay, when we all live as LESbians every day.
For staff assistance or support issues please use the helpdesk ticket system at https://support.lowendspirit.com/index.php?a=add
Stop the planet! I wish to get off!
Well holy shit.
People thought that I was retarded.
My pronouns are like/subscribe.
I have prod running in AMS, NYC, and Tokyo with Virmach. i never use them as single-point failure in that region tho
Fuck this 24/7 internet spew of trivia and celebrity bullshit.
Low traffic? How do you feel about no traffic?
... and carefully keep the URL secret, in fear of DDOSing the site by visits from all 25 readers of this thread...
congrats
wherever you put your website, make sure you have a backup.
Coincidence... Not the VirMach network issues as I haven't moved the site yet, but this:
(it's all bots of course)
Now THAT'S the WSS I remember. Welcome back
Who's @wss?