After many years of running my own server, it is finally time for me to wind things down and let the professionals maintain my server tasks. Monday, while away in New Jersey, my mail server stopped responding. I tried to ping it, but the neither the cable modem nor the server responded which lead me to believe that the cable modem hiccuped. Luckily my father was able to goto my house and reboot the cable modem and life was grand again (my server has been running constantly for 4 months, so the issue was connectivity). However, this was the last straw in running my own server. In August, I moved all my web services to a virtual server at VPSLink and it has been running flawlessly. As my virtual server has limited RAM and space, I decided to leave mail running on my own server and since SMTP has automatic retries when mail delivery fails due to connectivity issues, downtime wasn’t a big deal, or so I thought. While the mail wouldn’t be lost, it would be delayed which I now realize is just as problematic.
So, I’ve decided to give Google’s Google for Small Businesses a try. The basic account is free and gives each user their own account with 2 GB of space. I simply have to set it up and point my DNS to it. Over the course of the next week or so, I’ll do 2 things. First, I’ll change all my DNS handling to GoDaddy as their Total DNS Control comes free with each domain registration (currently I run BIND and do my own DNS with a backup DNS elsewhere) and then I’ll move over to Google. In addition, GoDaddy will handle incoming email and redirect it, so I can setup email addresses on a few of the domains to point to other places without actually having to have mailboxes. I have 11 domains to deal with, so this change over is going to take a little bit of time. I’m going to setup 3 separate Google accounts (each account can have multiple email boxes) and then lump mail from the other domains into those accounts. This is something that I need to do carefully or I’ll make a mess and I’ll drive myself crazy trying to fix it.
After I move everything, a few questions remain. I still run my own Asterisk based PBX; should I keep this or simply just have my Polycom phone hooked into the VOIP provider without having my own IVR system and multiple extensions? Second question is about my cable modem account. I have a business cable modem account which costs twice what a residential account does, but lets me run a server. Is this still worth it? I have 5 static IP addresses with the account. I just checked my email and this is a moot point for another year as I signed a 3 year contract for my cable modem. OK, maybe next December I’ll change my service. Third, I run my Squeezeboxes off my server. I could setup an old Shuttle box I have which will be quieter and more efficient which is an option. Fourth, I have my server backup my virtual private server every day and my MacBook Pro backs up to my server daily. So, maybe I still need my server running, but if it goes down or the connection to it goes down, the consequences are minor (if the connection is down, my VOIP provider has voicemail which will pick up calls). Writing this out, helped me decide to keep my server. However, I might be able to scale back on the configuration as RAID1 is no longer as important, nor is a secondary hard drive, nor is a huge box, nor is a 1500 VA UPS.