So, I got unhappy with the responsiveness of fremont.jonmasters.org and my other UML client (with slightly better performance) in London. I’ve decided UML is a nice hack but I really want to be using something that tries a bit harder to be “real” virtualization. At this moment, that’s Xen, though that might change in the future. Various Xen virtual hosting is now available, and both existing providers are planning to switch eventually.
I don’t want to wait all year though, so I signed up with RimU (what a fucking cool name that is) and am so far impressed with the performance of dallas.jonmasters.org. I moved my US asterisk server over and now am not getting audio dropouts – it’s probably never going to be 100% perfect (it’s VoIP running over SIP after all) but it’s now at the point where I can implement moh (music on hold) and have a fully interactive menu system. Don’t worry, I paid magnatune for a license to play some of their music – it is, after all, only $12/year for personal home office use.
Next, my plan is to move other stuff currenly on fremont over to dallas, and then ask Linode nicely if they plan to give me access to their Xen beta before I pull the plug on them. I like Bytemark, but I’m probably going to can them in favor of BlackCat if they don’t have a compelling offering pretty soon. Blackcat (or Mythic) probably will provide a better service than the UML solution I have in the UK now. Oh well.
Worked out that I’m spending about $50USD/month on additional hosting and SIP/IAX for my non-printk stuff. On the face of it, that sounds like a reasonable amount to be paying for email and telephony, but I don’t pay anything to Verizon or Comcast for telephone service and I don’t have huge per-minute charges to call e.g. the UK. So, overall I think this is a more fun way to spend roughly the same amount of money.
Jon.
Not a day too soon, I say. In fact, I think you should’ve looked at OpenVZ hosting sooner, because UML was such a gross solution.
No disrespect to Jeff Dike, but UML is simply an unworkable model at its core. When he made his presentations at OLS 4 years ago, it seemed like a cool hack. But when I tried to hack on the code, it was a nightmare because adaptation of UNIX processes to CPU emulation created huge rough seams. No genius can make it work.
This taught me that there’s too much devil in details in these things. So I am careful to pronounce VMX the next great thing until I see the code and try to work with it.
Would you mind sharing which Rimuhosting VPS plan you are trying out?