My “Personal Project” for a long time has been small web/mail hosting, primarily for myself. For the last year or more I’ve achieved this with a group of small VPS services.
It started out back in 2008, I think, with a 256MB Xen machine, hosted by ezVPS (no longer in business). Eventually I picked up a second one from the same provider, and balanced the load with the different sites across the two servers.
As time went on and I grew my aspirations, I rented a 512MB KVM server from BuyVM/Frantech. When ezVPS shut down, I was in the process of moving one of my servers to a 256 KVM with BuyVM already, and I was able to snag another 256MB and move the other one. Right now I’m paying ~$20/mo for three servers ($10 for the 512 and $5 each for the 256s). Money has been a little tight, however, and now that I’m paying for and controlling the internet connection where I live I felt it was time to start moving things home.
I started by creating some new VMs on my VMWare server. I have one each for Administrative purposes (mostly just Puppet), the Panel (ISPConfig), the Web server, and the Mail server (though it will be shut down and I’ll use one of the 256s). With everything appearing to be running nicely, I started by moving one site to the new server. All appears in order, so it’s time to start moving the rest and slowly getting everything off the 512.
Once everything moved off, I can shut it down, cancel and start saving $10 a month. So far, so good.