Last night I read a story about how our favorite company (Network Solutions) which controls the US Domain Name system (and the costs associated to it) has decided to raise the price… again. So I hopped onto registrar account and checked out the status of my domains and nearly missed renewing a domain! Since I have only a few domains that im using for personal (and work purposes now!) I’m renewing them for a few years before the “man” decides to raise prices again and again each year. And I though yearly raises in apartment rents were bad 
I’ve been shopping around the past few days for either a colocated server space for an old box I have (AMD 64 4000, 4GB memory, 300GB HD) or a deal on a dedicated server. I’ve pretty much decided on going with Burst.net unless one of my recent quotes come back with a great deal since I cannot stand spending $50/mo on a Celeron with 512MB memory and 80GB HD vs what I can get for $70/mo.
There is an interesting thread on WHT that I stumbled upon dealing with the question of why cheap colo costs more than cheap dedicated:
This is probably a dumb question, but I’ve been curious about something. While shopping around for either a cheap dedicated server (less than $75/mo) or a cheap colo for a 1u server, I have noticed that the cheap dedicated servers are often less than a cheap colo, which seems odd to me since with a colo you bring your own machine.
For example, Sago Networks has cheap dedicateds for $50, $59, $79 etc. yet their cheapest colo option is $99. For Sago’s $50 dedicated you get 1000GB transfer and 2 IP’s, and with their $99 colo you get only get 100 GB transfer and 1 IP.
And Sago is not unusual in this respect. I’ve priced other providers that fall into this category and they have similar differences.
So why is colo more expensive than dedicated for similar, if not lower, features?
The reason I’m going to a dedicated/colo server (again!) is because this VPS has proven too unstable for me. I can’t deal with my sites being up and down or painfully slow because another VPS is eating up all of the hosts CPU. Plus I can’t run any game servers for fun! I also will get about 10x the server for 2.5x the cost which I think is a good deal and I get to put some of my old, idle hardware into action. This decisions seems Win-Win for everyone.
A couple of weeks ago I took ClanBase.com’s old DB server offline. The server (Dual Xeon 3.2Ghz, 6GB memory) was a workhorse for sure and required little maintenance during it’s production time.
The final #uptime was:
05:29:04 up 794 days, 22:58, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
It actually amazes me that we never ran into a problem with this server even with the amount of high traffic we were throwing at it. I forget it’s average QPS, but it was around 300 on average and that’s with caching enabled. I think over it’s 2 year life span I had to restart MySQL maybe 3 times. Hopefully this new DB server has the same track record 
For the past month and half I’ve been trying to use Ubuntu 7.10 exclusively. However, the same old story happened to me as it’s happened to others. Here’s the recap of some of the issues I ran into:
- Exchange client: I tried the thunderbird exchange client, didn’t work and webmail is no substitute for the full client
- IRC: X-Chat is awesome, however I use BNC’s that require both a password and a different port on connection; something X-Chat doesn’t like
- Flash: It’s “supported” but not fully since some flash movies work (ie> most of youtubes) and others do not (ie> just about all of yahoo.com’s)
- Java: Hit and miss for websites (ie> SmugMug). I trialed SmugMug and generally like the service but I wasn’t able to fool with the easy to upload features during the trial.
- Nvidia 8800GT: It’s not new but yet the drivers are considered beta and need to be MANUALLY installed (and reinstalled for every kernel upgrade/recompile)
- Creative X-Fi: Not supported at all and I had to install a SB Live! card to get sound! This card is not very new so I’m not understanding the hold up here.
- Dell Webcam: I got spoiled by this little puppy for the first month I had this monitor before I switched to Ubuntu but it’s not supported in any way in Linux right now
- Games: I had WoW running under emulation
Things I will miss
- (Good) Virtual Desktop: Windows has it but it’s not as good as Ubuntu implementation. I really liked the ability to use the scroll button to switch between 2 Virtual Desktops
- Overall Unix Desktop feel: The only way I’m getting this back is if I switch to a Mac… and if OS X ever supports (not via hacks) my XPS 720, I just might pull the trigger on that.
- Compiz: The wobbly effect is an immediate disable in my mind but I do like this engine after all
- 4GB memory usage: The most I used was 3.2GB but having all 4GB available was nice!
As I thought before, Linux on the Desktop is a good idea but won’t be fully realized outside of nitches and devices like the Asus EeePC. I still think the ultimate (Open Source) OS will be something based around a design like BeOS…. now if Haiku can only get to beta stage I can start considering a switch to it!