Recently my wife and I had our second child. Instead of putting the kids in day care and pay somebody else to raise our children we decided that my wife would stay home. This meant a drastic change to our income. As part of our cost cutting measures, I decided to leave my VPS hosting provider which is heavily overkill for the small traffic our websites generate. I never once had a problem with Linode and highly recommend them to anybody looking for quality service at a good price. Their staff is so educated with linux they make my skills seem non-existent.
Over the last couple of years I have moved away from running machines at home 24/7. This used to be the norm for me so I would have constant access to my data, however it became a nuisance for a few reasons. First, it meant always having a machine on generating heat and sucking power. Second, the longer the machine was up, the more “hours” on things like hard drives and CPUs. This makes hard drives die much faster. The downfall with rebooting often is PSUs are more likely to fail. All in all, I was happy with my solution for a couple of years. SSH to my router (which is running OpenWrt) and use wake-on-lan packets to turn on machines if I wanted at my data. Then I could also remotely shut down my machines to save power when I was done getting what I needed.
I didn’t exactly like the time I had to wait for things, and my wife couldn’t then access data without doing “magic” which she didn’t like. This made it hard for me (an anal-retentive data hoarder) to have a way to “share” the family pictures, and other important things since the machines were only on when I wanted them on. I began looking for a solution and came across the SheevaPlug. It is an embedded system that ships with an ubuntu installation by default and it’s only $100. I had to get one! It runs a 1.2GHz Kirkwood ARM processor and has 512Mb RAM and 512 Nand flash.
The little thing draws just about 5 watts according to my kill-a-watt with a 500 Gb Seagate drive as the root filesystem. I have migrated all my services from Linode to my SheevaPlug to run everything from home using my business Internet connection. The SheevaPlug has plenty of horsepower to run all of my services which include apache (with php5), samba, nfs, email (postfix, postgrey, courier-authlib, courier-imap, courier-pop, spamassassin, clamav, amavis, roundcube). Quite impressive if you ask me. It’s been really stable even though it’s labeled as a “development kit” and my uptime and load average can be seen in the footer of this website.
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