Project : Uptime

The uptime of this blog has been really bad recently. I switched to hosting it on a Rackspace virtual server last year and went with the cheapest option. A 256MB Linux virtual server that was costing me ~$12/month. I never got around to tuning the OS, so the server was always using swap and would go down pretty much every day. Last week, I upgraded the plan and moved to a 512MB server. But the uptime hasn’t been any better. Here’s a report from Pingdom (which by the way is a great service to track the uptime and responsiveness of your website) showing the availability of the site over the last year 96%!!.. And for someone that has been working in the operations and infrastructure world, that is unacceptable :). So my new goal is to maintain at least 99.5% uptime. Here is my plan to achieve this

1. Move to a fresh VM with the latest kernel
2. Upgrade to the latest version of Apache. Initially, I wanted to move to nginx or lighttpd, but with the recent Apache upgrade, I hear good things about Apache working well in low memory situations.
3. Upgrade to latest version of MySQL and tune it for memory usage
4. Configure cloudflare to serve a static version of front page, in case the server goes down. Design the static page to point people to my other digital presences (Google+, LinkedIn, Flickr etc)

I plan to blog the progress and learnings as I implement this plan.