[PLUG-TALK] "virtual server" hosting recommendations?

[Keith Lofstrom]

John Sechrest wrote:
> If you are looking for true virtual server hosting, then
> sites like rimuhosting seem interesting (http://www.rimuhosting.com)

I use rimuhosting myself.  My April 2006 Advanced Topics talk was about
virtual servers - the talk is at http://www.keithl.com/offsite.html .

On Fri, May 26, 2006 at 07:21:02AM -0700, Brent Rieck wrote:
> I won't be putting a domain on it, I just want it as a well connected
> place to keep backups.

Note that most of these places offer limited disk space and charge
through the nose for disk space, typically $1/GB/month .  While this
is far cheaper than the offsite backup companies, it is too expensive
to store extensive backups.  A rule of thumb is to allow 3X storage;
if you have 20GB to back up, make room for 60GB.

In a later post, you mentioned you were avoiding rsync because you
want a push backup.  You can do a push backup with rsync;  dirvish
doesn't use rsync that way because it is frighteningly insecure.
Still, if that is what you want, you can use rsync standalone, or
find other wrapper programs that do it.  rsync offers so many
advantages for backup-to-disk-over-networks that it is hard to 
justify other methods.  

If you want push scheduling with a pull server (still quite secure)
you can accomplish that with a dirvish job initiated by a ssh call
from the client.   More on dirvish at www.dirvish.org .

If you want push backup because the site is behind a firewall, 
you can drill a VPN tunnel with OpenVPN.

Finally, Yet Another Alternative for external diskspace is using
the gmail filesystem with rsync.  It turns the 2GB gmail disk 
storage into a cheesy remote file system, see http://snurl.com/8q38 .
If you were rude, I suppose you could set up 50 accounts and use
LVM to build a 100GB offsite file system, but That Would Be Wrong.

Does anyone know of a cheap legitimate source of offsite disk space?

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs