This weekend I spent quite a bit of time (that should have been dedicated to doing something fun, or at least to productive work) dealing with a significant hardware scare. The OS on my web server started freezing up randomly, not allowing me to make any changes to the system, or even to shut it down cleanly. A little bit of investigation showed that the root filesystem was setting itself to read-only, which in turn led me to “unspecified errors” in the SMART diagnostics. My excellent tech support contacts at Core Networks were quickly able to determine that the drive was indeed failing, and after a bunch of prep work and backups, we got the data moved to a new drive. Since mid-2009 I’ve had a colocated server with Core, and I honestly cannot say enough good things about them; they run a very cost-effective colo service, and their tech support is absolutely top-notch. If you need a physical colo server for any reason, I highly recommend them. However, physical servers do have one flaw: they’re physical, and they run on real hardware. Of course, virtual machines also run on real hardware, but the abstraction between the two is extensive enough that failing hardware can be easily migrated away from without the virtual system being aware of the change.
Wasting a day on diagnostics, tech support conversations, backups, and restorations made me question whether a physical server was really what I needed. The conclusion I came to was that I did not, and that a virtual server was the best choice. Although Core recently began offering virtual servers, and I was reluctant to take my business elsewhere, the fact is that while they’ve been doing colo for years, VMs are a very new market for them, and I’ve always had incredible success with Slicehost’s virtual servers. So, I signed up for a “512 slice” at Slicehost (which is a little cramped; I may upgrade in the near future) and have migrated all of my sites and data off of the physical server. While I’ll be sorry to say goodbye to Core, the fact is that I didn’t need the extras that having a colo server provided (hard drive space, in particular, tends to be much cheaper in physical servers) and the extra cost in terms of management burden simply wasn’t worthwhile.
