Cyberdyne's Journal: Server death, the sequel...

*sniff* Alas, poor Server!

My current server, home to some of my websites, some e-mail and half my DNS service, has decided it would make life more fun if it rebooted spontaneously every few minutes. Nothing in the logs, just unsolicited rebooting - possibly a power supply issue of some sort. (All I know is SMART shows the hard drive is OK; I'd expect most memory or CPU problems to give different symptoms, but being eight time zones away makes diagnostics rather limited.)

I was going to have to change all my domain registrations anyway, since the IP address was going to change soon because of new transit arrangements with their transit provider, but now it's rather more urgent: I have a production site which is only sporadically available! :-(

My plan is to get a second virtual server (I had one virtual and one physical, until now) and set everything up to be replicated between them (currently, I only have DNS and MySQL replicated fully, with some web sites rsynced when I change them, others only hosted on one machine or the other). Email will be more of a pain: I have a few mailing lists under ezmlm, which I'll probably convert to use MySQL for replicated list management (so list posts get delivered to and distributed by either of the two) - but my mailboxes themselves can only live on a single host, really.

The one big advantage of having a physical server was the value: for about the same money, I got far more disk space, RAM and bandwidth, with a dedicated CPU instead of sharing a couple of Xeon cores with a dozen or two other users. On the downside, no console access (I did have for a while, but that disappeared at some point), less control (a couple of times I ordered remote power-cycling through the host's web interface, while still logged in to the server; from the fact I was still logged in, the reboot didn't seem as successful as the site claimed!) - and no protection against hardware failure, which suddenly seems much more important now...

Has anyone in the zoo set up things like this before? Or, for that matter, got any ideas why my previously-reliable server suddenly starts rebooting itself? Any hosting recommendations for me?

Dedicated servers

[Alioth]

I use lchost.co.uk for one of my servers - when one went flaky repeatedly, they apologised by giving me a free upgrade.

Physical servers

[Tet]

On the downside, no console access (I did have for a while, but that disappeared at some point), less control (a couple of times I ordered remote power-cycling through the host's web interface, while still logged in to the server; from the fact I was still logged in, the reboot didn't seem as successful as the site claimed!) - and no protection against hardware failure, which suddenly seems much more important now...

Huh? That's purely a function of where you host it. I have both serial console access and

Re:

[Cyberdyne]

Huh? That's purely a function of where you host it. I have both serial console access and reliable remote power cycling available for my hosted physical servers. Yes, hardware failure is still potentially a problem, but RAIDed storage, dual power supplies and redundant network ports go a long way to mitigating that risk. Oh, and ECC memory, which is worth every penny you pay for it.

I'd agree with that - the thing is, at the price point I'm looking at (more or less personal use, with three commercial sites

Re:

[Tet]

the money just doesn't cover redundant power or network connections, or indeed mirrored storage.

Sure it does. Most servers come with two ports now anyway, and for those that don't, a PCI card is £2.50. Depending on who you use for colo, they may charge you a (relatively small) fee for an extra switch port. Mirrored disks can be done entirely in software, removing the need for a RAID controller. Thus all you need is an extra IDE/SATA disk, and they're dirt cheap these days. I'll agree that redundant