While my old hosting with Laughing Squid was did its job, I was very limited in what I could do with it. Access only via sftp, 1GB of storage and I was breaking my monthly 25GB traffic limit fairly frequently… So it was time to look for something new.

For me, the primary consideration when choosing a provider is price. My website is not really worth any investment… A thread on reddit pointed me at DigitalOcean (which may or may not be spelled with a space…). It was cheap at $5 per month – in fact cheaper than what I was paying – and 20GB storage on SSD with 1TB transfer is more than enough for me. I also figure that one core and 512MB RAM is enough for my requirements. As a bonus, they provide Arch Linux images, which I am mildly familiar with administrating.

Time to create a “droplet” as they are called. I chose the 32bit Arch install given the low RAM available to me and selected the San Francisco data center given where I live. The DigitalOcean front page tells me this will take 55 seconds. It took 69 seconds but I think I will forgive that! I get an IP address and can ssh in. All good so far.

Checking out what packages are installed, it appears to be all of the base and base-devel groups and ssh. The base-devel group probably is not needed, so I start by removing a whole bunch of those packages including autotools, binutils and gcc. Also, the system is installed on a single ext4 partition, so I can get rid of all packages to deal with other file system types. There are probably other unnecessary packages installed too, but the install really does not take up that much space. And it is not as if Arch is designed to be super slim anyway.

Time to update. The image is from 2013.03, so should be straight forward. Hrmm…

warning: linux: ignoring package upgrade (3.8.4-1 => 3.9.3-1)
warning: linux-api-headers: ignoring package upgrade (3.7.3-1 => 3.8.4-1)

Lets peak in pacman.conf:

###############################################################################
# Please note: if you update the linux kernel via pacman and reboot, you will
# lose access to your droplet! Please don't remove 'linux linux-api-headers'
# from IgnorePkg.
###############################################################################
IgnorePkg = linux linux-api-headers

Well, that is not right, but quite a common mistake. The package linux-api-headers provides userspace headers for the toolchain, so its update is linked to updates in glibc, gcc etc and not that of the kernel. The linux-headers package provides kernel headers, but is not needed on a VPS. So I open a support ticket suggesting this is fixed. This is where I was impressed. I got an initial acknowledgment response within minutes (from what is potentially an actual person) and further responses before the end of the day from people high up the food chain.

Looking further into the install, it is using netcfg to connect to the network. I guess this will need to be upgraded to netctl one day, but given I have never used either of those, I think I will save that for later. The netcfg configuration file that appears to be automatically set-up during droplet creation looks a bit of a mess, but works.

That is all I could see that is changed from a vanilla Arch install, so overall everything is exactly as I would expect.

I suppose the only other thing to look at is the Digital Ocean control panel. It provides everything I would expect – console access, power cycling, backup facilities. Not sure about having a “root password reset” function though… From there you can update your kernel to a recent Arch one (3.9.2-1). This is something I don’t quite understand. It is the Arch packaged kernel (as demonstrated by the pacman -Qi output), so something is happening in the background on update that is not happening when doing it via the package manager. I wonder if they could do whatever that is via our packaging system and provide a repository allowing a direct update of the kernel.

I can not really conclude much from a couple of days testing, but all seems good and speeds are fine… I think I have my website completely transfered (with only a small redirection “https” + “www prefix” combination issue to fix), so let me know if anything is out of order.