A year with Directadmin

[factor]

Hope I didn't derail this thread too much.

No worries. Your input is good. It is mostly my thoughts as a customer. I find not many post their experiences.

Our custom migration script allows for easy moving of customers between our servers, with minimal downtime.

Yep, one of the things I wish DA had. I think maybe alot of folks have in house solutions for certain things. Have you considered sharing?

The fact that all this, and more, is possible (and fairly easily to do)

if you are a coder or have devops.

exact same compilation on 50 servers seems a little silly.

True, but Linux doesn't really have a Poudriere like FreeBSD?

Some sort of clustering functionality is also something we would be very interested in. Being able to serve a gone-viral website from an auto-scaled pool of servers instead of a single server would be an increadibly powerful feature.

I think this is one of the features Interworx has but never tried it. I would like to see this as well. To bad Hshpere got buried it was way ahead of its time in the 90s.

we've been using rdiff-backup for server level incremental backups for many years

If you all can do it as well as others wonder why DA took forever?

 

[kristian]

Yep, one of the things I wish DA had. I think maybe alot of folks have in house solutions for certain things. Have you considered sharing?

Yes, but as always, there is never enough time, and many of our scripts are full of custom settings and somewhat hardcoded configs making them not ideal for sharing in their current state.

True, but Linux doesn't really have a Poudriere like FreeBSD?

We use FPM (https://fpm.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro.html) to make .deb packages for most of our custom scripts and tools. It can also create other package formats. FPM is probably not the right tool to use if Custombuild were to add a packaging step though. I'd much rather see DA maintaining a package repository with pre-built packages. Most of the software provided by DA/Custombuild is already available as packages from the standard repositories, just different versions. Existing packages means existing source packages, which should also mean the path to a custom source package (and as a result a binary package) doesn't have to be too complex. Being able to upgrade all software on a server including DA software using apt-get would be amazing.

I think this is one of the features Interworx has but never tried it. I would like to see this as well. To bad Hshpere got buried it was way ahead of its time in the 90s.

It doesn't have to be very complicated, and it doesn't even necessarily have to cover all services. Web being the most important, to be able to cope with sudden spikes. I have some ideas about how to do a very minimal scaling setup, but I suspect I'll never get around to actually trying out anything.

If you all can do it as well as others wonder why DA took forever?

I guess it's the problem of it-works-for-me vs it-must-work-for-everyone. Our system is file level, and knows nothing of individual users, which also means our users can't perform any restores themselves. It is mainly a backup for our own use, for those oh-shit moments. We encourage users to run their own backups using the existing DA tools. If they need a restore from our system/file level backups, we charge for it.

 

[k1l0b1t]

guess it's the problem of it-work-for-me vs it-must-work-for-everyone. Our system is file level, and knows nothing of individual users, which also means our users can't perform any restores themselves. It is mainly a backup for our own use, for those oh-shit moments. We encourage users to run their own backups using the existing DA tools. If they need a restore from our system/file level backups, we charge for it.

I use directadmins admin level backup system, which does the job fine for me (though, I'm not a hosting company, I just host myself and a few friends)

 

[kristian]

I use directadmins admin level backup system, which does the job fine for me (though, I'm not a hosting company, I just host myself and a few friends)

Unless I'm mistaken, there's no incremental support in the DA admin level backups, so if you have a user with 5GB of data, keeping two weeks worth of daily backups for that user would take up 5GB*14 = 70GB of storage. This really does not scale with lots of servers with lots of users.

 

[k1l0b1t]

Unless I'm mistaken, there's no incremental support in the DA admin level backups, so if you have a user with 5GB of data, keeping two weeks worth of daily backups for that user would take up 5GB*14 = 70GB of storage. This really does not scale with lots of servers with lots of users.

yes, but as I'm hosting on a single server, just for me and a few friends, it's perfectly fine (I keep daily backups for 3 days, and weekly backups for 4 weeks)