According to Wikipedia:
“A virtual private server (also referred to as virtual dedicated server or virtual server, and abbreviated VPS or VDS) is a server run through virtualization in tandem with other virtualized servers on one physical computer.”
Which is a pretty good description. I use TekTonic as my VPS provider and I don’t have a complaint about their service since I get a good uptime. I pay a really good fee and definitely get what I pay for.
But I think with any VPS there are things you need to check on. I notice that processes that I need (oh say, my apache web server) will inexplicably die without any reason in the log.
Lately I have not been getting my mailed database backups. I have a cron job that backs up all my blog data and files, and another one on my basement for pulling down the gpg encrypted file so no data has been lost. The mail process died (postfix, only listens on localhost) and a weeks worth of automated mail got queued up. I also need named since this host is a back DNS server for my domain.
I was thinking of doing uber script magic then I realized I should just put the following into root’s crontab.
0,15,30,45 * * * * /usr/sbin/rcapache2 start >/dev/null 2>&1
0,15,30,45 * * * * /usr/sbin/rcnamed start >/dev/null 2>&1
0,15,30,45 * * * * /sbin/rcpostfix start >/dev/null 2>&1
It’s not elegant but it works. I don’t need to know if it was successful or not and this was a quick fix.
